Saturday, June 28, 2014

Chelsea Manning SF Pride Contingent 2014http://www.facebook.com/events/298467196976692/June 28/29 Celebration Civic CenterJune 29 Parade Market StreetThis year we have more reason to celebrate the SF Pride 2014 parade in SanFrancisco: Heroic WikiLeaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning is being honoredas an official Grand Marshal! March with us to show your pride in Chelsea!

Organized by the Chelsea Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist.Endorsing organizations include War Resisters League-West, CODEPINK Womenfor Peace, CivSol, and the Brass Liberation Orchestra.

Please contact us to include your organization as an endorser!

A motorized cable car will be available for participants with mobilitylimitations.

For further details, please contact farah@couragetoresist.org*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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South African Metalworkers Union
Speaks

Andrew Chirwa, President of NUMSA

Saturday,
July 5, 7:00 P.M.

ILWU
34, Ship Clerks Union

801
2nd St., SF next to AT&T Stadium

LaborFest film showing

“Miners Shot Down”

Sunday,
July 6, 2:00 P.M.

www. laborfest.net

ILWU
10, Longshore Union 400 N. Point St./Mason, SF

Special
meeting with Andrew Chirwa, NUMSA President

“Bloody Ihursday” July
5 commemorates the police murder of maritime workers in the 1934 Big Strike
which provoked the San Francisco General Strike. All U.S. West Coast ports are
shutdown to honor the six labor martyrs killed during the strike.

In 2012, at the
Marikana mine in South Africa, 34 striking miners were massacred by police.
ILWU Local 10 sent a letter of protest to the ANC-led government. Andrew
Chirwa, president of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa
(NUMSA), the largest union in that country will address workers about the
massacre and the miners strike, the longest in South African history and the
impending metalworkers strike.

On July 1, both the
South African metalworkers union and the ILWU longshore contracts expire. NUMSA
is preparing for a “full-blown strike” much like the maritime workers did in
1934. Now is the time for international labor solidarity.

Organized
by the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee

www.transportworkers.org

Solidarity
Has No Borders!

For
more information: (510) 501-7080, (415) 282-1908

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Bay
Area United Against War Newsletter

Table
of Contents:

A.
ARTICLES IN FULL

B.
EVENTS AND ACTIONS

C.
SPECIAL APPEALS AND ONGOING CAMPAIGNS

D.
VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.

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A.
ARTICLES IN FULL

(Unless
otherwise noted)

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1) Use of Drones for Killings Risks a War Without End, Panel Concludes in Report

17) Rations Reduced as Demand Grows for Soup Kitchens
"The New York City Coalition Against Hunger
has estimated that one in six city residents are “food insecure,” or
living in homes where there is not enough money to put enough food on
the table."

WASHINGTON
— The Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killings using armed
drones risks putting the United States on a “slippery slope” into
perpetual war and sets a dangerous precedent for lethal operations that
other countries might adopt in the future, according to a report by a
bipartisan panel that includes several former senior intelligence and
military officials.

The group found that more than a decade into
the era of armed drones, the American government has yet to carry out a
thorough analysis of whether the costs of routine secret killing
operations outweigh the benefits. The report urges the administration to
conduct such an analysis and to give a public accounting of both
militants and civilians killed in drone strikes.

The findings amount to a sort of report card — one that delivers middling grades — a year after President Obama
gave a speech promising new guidelines for drone strikes and greater
transparency about the killing operations. The report is especially
critical of the secrecy that continues to envelop drone operations and
questions whether they might be creating terrorists even as they are
killing them.

“There is no indication that a U.S. strategy to destroy Al Qaeda
has curbed the rise of Sunni Islamic extremism, deterred the
establishment of Shia Islamic extremist groups or advanced long-term
U.S. security interests,” the report concludes.

The panel includes a number of former Pentagon and C.I.A.
officials and is jointly led by retired General John P. Abizaid, the
former head of United States Central Command, and Rosa Brooks, a fellow
at the New America Foundation and a law professor at Georgetown
University. Other members of the group are Philip Mudd, a former deputy
director of the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center; Jeffrey Smith, who
served as the C.I.A.’s general counsel during the Clinton
administration; and John B. Bellinger III, the legal adviser to the
National Security Council and the State Department during the
administration of George W. Bush.

The
report will be publicly released on Thursday morning by the Stimson
Center, a nonpartisan Washington think tank. The New York Times was
given a copy of the report in advance of its release.

Caitlin
Hayden, a White House spokeswoman, said, “I’m not in a position to
comment on a report that hasn’t been released yet, but we look forward
to reviewing it.”

“The administration is exploring ways we can
provide more information about the United States’ use of force in
counterterrorism operations outside areas of active hostilities,
including information that provides the American people with a better
understanding of U.S. assessments of civilian casualties,” she said,
adding that the United States needs to preserve “the ability to continue
those operations.”

The report challenges some widespread
criticisms of armed drones. Arguing that they should neither be
“glorified nor demonized,” it said there was strong evidence that
civilian deaths from armed drone strikes are far fewer than from
traditional combat aircraft. The panel also said there was little reason
to conclude that drones create a “PlayStation mentality” — turning war
into a video game that eliminates the psychological costs to drone
pilots.

In fact, the report said, because drone pilots watch
their targets sometimes for days and weeks before pulling the trigger —
and then see them blown up on a high-resolution video screen — they are
more susceptible to post-traumatic stress than pilots of manned
aircraft.

The panel instead reserves the bulk of its criticism
for how two successive American presidents have conducted a “long-term
killing program based on secret rationales,” and how too little thought
has been given to what consequences might be spawned by this new way of
waging war.

The Obama administration has been reluctant to make
public any of the legal underpinnings of the targeted killing program.
As part of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by the The Times
and the American Civil Liberties Union, a federal appeals court this
week released a redacted version of a 2010 Justice Department memo that
blessed as legal the effort to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Muslim
cleric and American citizen who died in a 2011 C.I.A. drone strike in
Yemen. One section of the memo, a compilation of evidence to support
administration claims that Mr. Awlaki had become an operational
terrorist who posed a direct threat to Americans, remained redacted.

Some
of the panel’s recommendations have already been embraced — although
not yet adopted — by the Obama administration. One of the
recommendations, shifting responsibility from the C.I.A. to the Pentagon
for the bulk of drone operations, was first discussed by White House
officials last May although the C.I.A. continues to carry out drone
strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. It is unclear when, if ever, the C.I.A.
will be taken off the mission of firing missiles from armed drones.

The
panel’s recommendation that the government release information about
drone victims follows a provision the Senate Intelligence Committee
included in its authorization bill last year demanding that the Obama
administration give an annual report about the number of militants and
civilians killed and injured in drone strikes. But intelligence
officials fought the provision and Senators quietly stripped it from the
bill in April.

The report raised warnings that other countries
might adopt the same rationale as the United States has for carrying out
lethal strikes outside of declared war zones. Using an example of a
current crisis, it said that Russia could use armed drones in Ukraine
under the justification that it was killing anti-Russian terrorists and
then refuse to disclose the intelligence that served as the basis for
the strike.

“In such circumstances,” the report asked, “how could the United States credibly condemn Russian targeted killings?”

WASHINGTON
— The witness wore a suit with no tie, the top button of his gray shirt
undone. He had told this story many times, and now that he was in the
United States, telling his story at last to a jury, he appeared neither
hurried nor anxious.

Sarhan Deab Abdul Moniem, the witness, was a
traffic officer that day in September 2007, when a convoy of Blackwater
Worldwide trucks pulled into his traffic circle in Baghdad and started
shooting. He held up two hands, showing jurors how he had pleaded with
the American security contractors to stop. Through an interpreter, he
spoke in a matter-of-fact way about running toward a victim inside a
white Kia sedan.

“There was a lady. She was screaming and weeping
about her son and asking for help,” Mr. Moniem said. He showed jurors
how she had cradled her dead son’s head on her shoulder. “I asked her to
open up the door so I could help her. But she was paying attention only
to her son.”More than four dozen Iraqi citizens like Mr. Moniem are
scheduled to travel to Washington in the coming months to testify
against the Americans who they say fired wildly on unarmed citizens,
leaving 17 Iraqis dead. For years, they have waited as the case wound
its way through the American court system. In a courtroom steps away
from the Capitol, they are finally having their say. The Justice
Department says it will be the largest number of foreign witnesses to
testify in a criminal trial.

“Significant resources have been
expended to ensure the witnesses have access to the U.S. court system,”
said Andrew C. Ames, a spokesman for the F.B.I., which is coordinating
the travel arrangements.

Family members and survivors have said
they see this trial as a test of America’s judicial system. And though
they have expressed frustration and skepticism, dozens have volunteered
to take part.

They are not all as understated as Mr. Moniem. The
government’s first witness, Mohammed Hafedh Abdulrazzaq Kinani, broke
down last week as he talked about his 9-year-old son, Ali, who was shot in the head
while riding in the back seat of the family car. Mr. Kinani sobbed so
uncontrollably that Judge Royce C. Lamberth sent the jury out of the
room. The next day, one juror said she had been too haunted to sleep.
The judge excused her from service.

The Nisour Square shooting
was a signature point in the Iraq war, one that inflamed anti-American
sentiment abroad and contributed to the impression that Americans were
reckless and unaccountable. The Iraqi government wanted to prosecute the
security contractors in Iraq, but the American government refused to
allow it.

When the Justice Department indicted five former
Blackwater guards in 2008 and reached a plea deal with a sixth,
prosecutors said it was a message that, whether in a war zone or not,
nobody was above the law.

But the case has suffered repeated setbacks, frequently of the government’s own making. In Iraq, the delays contributed to the impression
that Blackwater operated with impunity. Prosecutors ultimately dropped
charges against one guard, citing a lack of evidence, and have gone to
trial against the remaining four: Dustin L. Heard, Evan S. Liberty,
Nicholas A. Slatten and Paul A. Slough.

For the most part, the
horrors of the Nisour Square shooting are uncontested. Nobody disputes
that a team of Blackwater guards, working for the State Department,
drove four armored trucks into a busy traffic circle and opened fire. It
is clear that it all began with the white Kia, and that by the time the
shooting subsided, there were many dead.

But the four former
security guards standing trial — three on manslaughter charges, one on a
murder charge — say they believed they were being ambushed in the
traffic circle. A car bomb had just detonated a short distance away and
the white Kia, defense lawyers argue, looked like a potential follow-up
bomb lurching toward the convoy. The guards also said they were under
fire from insurgents.

Defense lawyers hope that inconsistencies
in the Iraqis’ stories will raise doubts about what happened. Mr.
Moniem, for instance, said the first shots came from one of the gunners
standing in a turret atop one of the vehicles. Prosecutors say it was
Mr. Slatten, a former Army sniper, who fired the first shots from inside
his armored truck. His murder charge hangs on whether that is true.That
is the risk of having such a long list of witnesses. With so many
people recalling a shooting from so many vantage points, there will be
inconsistencies. The prosecution is counting on these inconsistencies
fading away as witness after witness agrees that the shooting was
unprovoked and the victims were unarmed.

Majed Salman Abdel
Kareem al-Gharbawi, a 55-year-old commodity trader, testified Tuesday
that he was riding in a small truck with his friend Osama Abbas when the
shooting started directly in front of them. Mr. Gharbawi tried to run
away and was shot in the abdomen. As he slumped to the ground, he said,
he saw another man who had been shot.

“He was screaming and
praying to god, for Allah to save him from this calamity,” Mr. Gharbawi
testified. In Islam, he explained, it is customary for the dying to say a
final prayer. “So I told him, let’s do that together.”

As Mr.
Gharbawi lay in the street, Mr. Abbas also tried to run. He did not make
it far. “His body was shaking violently as the bullets were piercing
him and hitting the sidewalk,” Mr. Gharbawi said. He said the American
security guards kept shooting at Mr. Abbas even after he was on the
ground, clearly dead.

The F.B.I. will not discuss details of the
arrangements it has made for the Iraqis. In court documents, the
Justice Department describes the effort as “a significant logistical
challenge” involving coordination with State Department and immigration
officials. Because it is impossible to predict when exactly a witness’s
testimony will begin and end, some people are inevitably on call,
waiting to see if they will need to go to court.

On the third day
of Mr. Moniem’s testimony, T. Patrick Martin, the prosecutor,
apologized and said he had just a few more questions. Mr. Moniem said
there was no need to rush.

“All my time is to you,” he said,
smiling. “As long as we are trying to arrive at what is right and
helpful to people, I am here and at your service.”

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3) Egyptian Activists to Stand Trial for Protesting Ban on Protests
By ROBERT MACKEY

prosecutor in Cairo plans to charge 23 opposition activists with violating a new law banning unsanctioned protests for attending a rally last Saturday against the ban.

The defendants were detained after their peaceful march was attacked
by a group of men in civilian clothes who seemed to arrive with the
police and hurled rocks and bottles at the protesters. They were also
accused of “stirring chaos,” vandalism, resisting arrest and possessing
“arms,” or fireworks, according to Aswat Masriya, an Egyptian news site sponsored by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The
authorities “interrogated Sallam extensively about the work of the
organization” for which she works, Human Rights Watch said in a statement deploring the arrests.
“The detention of Yara Sallam,” said Joe Stork, a regional director for
Human Rights Watch, “raises concerns that authorities want to
intimidate and silence Egyptian rights activists who have bravely
criticized this law and other rights violations that have become routine
since the military takeover last July.”

Ms. Seif comes from a
family of prominent activists. Her brother, known to his hundreds of
thousands of Twitter followers as simply @Alaa, was sentenced in absentia this month for attending a protest last year. Her sister, Mona Seif,
founded the group No Military Trials for Civilians. Their father, Ahmed
Seif El-Islam Hamed, once ran the Cairo-based Hisham Mubarak Law Center
and spent five years in jail in the 1980s for his opposition to Egypt’s
autocratic government. And their mother, Laila Soueif, is a professor
at Cairo University who has a long history of activism.

Members
of that family and other supporters of the detainees staged a small
sit-in outside a courthouse in Heliopolis from Tuesday night until
Wednesday, documented on Twitter by the activist blogger Kareem Farid and Ms. Seif’s cousin, Omar Robert Hamilton.

Mr. Hamilton also shared a photograph
of his cousin’s bedroom door to give a sense of how many causes she has
supported in the three years since Egypt’s young revolutionaries forced
former President Hosni Mubarak from power.

The detainees are expected to appear in court on Sunday, Aswat Masriya reported.

JERUSALEM — Scores of Palestinian detainees in Israel have suspended their mass hunger strike
after more than two months without food, Israeli and Palestinian
officials said on Wednesday, removing one source of friction in a volatile period since the recent kidnapping of three Israeli youths in the West Bank and a subsequent Israeli military crackdown.

All
75 detainees who remained on the hunger strike as of Tuesday, and who
are hospitalized, agreed to suspend their protest against Israel’s
practice of administrative detention, in which suspects are held without
charge or trial, without securing any change in that policy, according
to representatives of both sides.

Instead, representatives said,
the detainees received commitments that they will not be punished or
fined for taking part in the strike and that a dialogue on broader
issues relating to administrative detention will continue between
prisoner committee representatives, the Israeli prison authorities and
security officials.The Palestinian Authority’s minister for prisoner
affairs, Shawqi al-Aissa, and the nongovernmental Palestinian Prisoners
Society announced the end of the hunger strike at a news conference in
the West Bank city of Ramallah. Sivan Weizman, a spokeswoman for the
Israel Prison Service, said the 75 would remain under supervision in the
hospital, where they had been taking water and nonfood supplements,
until they were fit enough to go back to prison.

Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel praised his minister for internal security
and the prison authorities for their “determined” effort to end the
strike. He added that Israel was introducing additional methods to deter
future prisoner strikes — a reference to contentious draft legislation
that would allow the courts to authorize force-feeding of hunger
strikers in cases where their lives were deemed to be in danger. The
Israeli Parliament is expected to vote on the bill next week.

But
Qadura Fares, the president of the Palestinian Prisoners Society, said
in a telephone interview from Ramallah that the strike had ended through
dialogue and that “neither side broke.”

Israel feared that the death of a hunger striker would set off widespread unrest in the prisons and beyond.

On
the Palestinian side, Mr. Fares said, motivation for the strike had
waned, despite widespread sympathy among the Palestinian population,
because it was largely overtaken by other events. The strike, he said,
had dropped from the headlines in the aftermath of the kidnapping of the
Israeli teenagers. Mr. Fares added that the approach of the Muslim holy
month of Ramadan, scheduled to start this weekend, also contributed to
the decision to end the strike.

At the peak of the hunger strike in late May, more than 300 administrative detainees and convicted prisoners were participating.

The
suspension of the strike came as Israel began scaling back its military
operation in the West Bank, an intensive campaign that Palestinians and
human rights groups have denounced as collective punishment. Israel had
set itself two goals: to find the missing youths and to weaken the West
Bank infrastructure of Hamas, the Islamic militant group that Israel
blames for the abduction. While the first has not yet been met, the
second appears in large part to have exhausted itself.

Since the
June 12 kidnapping, 371 Palestinians have been arrested, 282 of them
suspected of being Hamas operatives, according to the Israeli military.
Among those detained are 57 former prisoners who were released in 2011
as part of an exchange for Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier who was held
captive by Hamas in Gaza for five years.

The military has
searched nearly 2,000 locations and has acted against 64 institutions
suspected of supporting Hamas, seizing equipment and funds. Movement
around Hebron, where Israel has centered its search for the abducted
teenagers, was restricted for about a week.

The toll of
Palestinians killed by Israeli fire during the campaign rose to five on
Wednesday. A Palestinian man died at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem,
according to a hospital spokeswoman, six days after being shot in the
head by Israeli troops during a clash in the Qalandiya refugee camp near Ramallah.

The
man, identified by Palestinian health officials as Mustafa Aslan, 22,
was brought to Hadassah Hospital hours after he was shot early Friday
morning, and had been in critical condition since.

It was
questionable how long Israel could maintain the pressure on the
Palestinian population given the mounting tensions and the approach of
Ramadan. Palestinian resistance to the Israeli forces has been on the
rise, and President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has come
under growing domestic pressure because of his unpopular pledge to help
find the abducted Israelis. Israel has come under increasing
international scrutiny, and rocket fire from Gaza against southern
Israel has risen, along with retaliatory airstrikes by Israel.

Israeli
officials have pledged to continue the intensive search for the
teenagers, Eyal Yifrach, 19; Gilad Shaar, 16; and Naftali Fraenkel, 16,
who also holds United States citizenship.

But the restrictions on
movement in the Hebron area have eased in recent days, and there has
been a significant drop in the number of arrests.

Israel’s
defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, said on Tuesday that the easing was not
the result of any political decision but that the military operation
against Hamas’s infrastructure and support system had largely run its
course.

Eight
times now, the European-dominated Accord on Fire and Building Safety in
Bangladesh — a group of more than 150 retailers and brands — has forced
the temporary closing of garment factories after its inspectors found
dangerous conditions.

But from the time the inspections began,
tensions have been growing between the Accord and the Bangladeshi
apparel industry, resulting in an impasse over a recent attempt to
shutter what the Accord considers an unsafe factory building that houses
Florence Fashions. And this time, as on several previous occasions, the
Bangladeshi government has aligned with a garment manufacturer opposed
to having its factory closed, even temporarily.

The series of
inspections through more than 1,000 of the country’s apparel factories
has been emotionally freighted from the start, with workers,
manufacturers, building owners and government officials watching the
process with conflicting sentiments.

Of course, many Bangladeshis
recognize the need for these inspections, and for some dangerous
factories to be closed, as part of a broad-based effort to prevent
another disaster like the Rana Plaza building collapse that killed 1,129 workers in April 2013.

But
factory closings can have immediate economic impact. Some factory
owners worry about losing large and profitable orders to other companies
and countries, and garment workers themselves fear losing their jobs.
In one of the first closings after an Accord inspection, workers took to
the streets in a raucous demonstration, protesting that their wages
might not be paid.

Created a little more than a year ago to
ensure worker safety in Bangladesh, the Accord has moved at a steady
pace with inspections. It has hired 110 engineers and inspected 775
factories for structural soundness, unsafe electrical boxes, adequate
fire exits and sprinkler systems — a new requirement for factory
buildings 75 feet or taller.

Somewhat paralleling the Accord, two
dozen American and Canadian companies, including Walmart and Gap, have
formed the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety. That group has
inspected 601 factories, and has had five of them fully or partly closed
because of the safety problems found, its officials say.

But in
numerous cases where hazardous conditions were uncovered, the groups
have confronted considerable resistance to closing a factory building
altogether, and to the notion that a building should be closed as soon
as possible.

In the case that has caused friction these last
several months, a 10-story building in Dhaka containing Florence
Fashions houses five factories, two of which produce garments for
retailers that belong to the Accord: Florence, with 800 employees, and
Cherry Private Limited.

Engineers at the Accord originally called
for the factories in the building to be closed after they inspected
Cherry — and Cherry’s managers quickly agreed to close until recommended
safety improvements were made.

But Florence declined to close,
although it complied with the Accord’s request to cease making goods
produced there for any Accord member — like Mavi, a Turkish company.
Florence has continued production for other, non-Accord buyers.

Rob
Wayss, the Accord’s executive director for Bangladesh, said his group —
which includes H&M, Carrefour and many other prominent companies —
has been trying to get the factory closed since an inspection in March.

The engineers “determined that in its current state, the building wasn’t safe for people to be in,” Mr. Wayss said.

Brad
Loewen, the chief inspector for the Accord, put it in more dire terms,
saying that he feared a collapse could occur. “The exact safety problem
was too much weight, too much of a load, on the support columns,” he
said.

But Florence’s director, Mohammad Monirul Islam, said in an
interview that the Accord had never formally presented his company with
papers specifying what safety problems were uncovered.

“The
Accord told us to shut down the factory instantly without giving any
solution,” Mr. Islam said in an interview this week at his factory. “The
Accord did not give us any report after inspecting our factory. They
did not give us any notice after the inspection.”

Accord
officials said they had met face-to-face with Florence’s executives and
sent them emails describing the problems. Mr. Islam said factories in
the building had removed their storage loads after inspectors said the
loads needed to be reduced immediately.

“When there’s a
structural inspection, when the building is found to be unsafe, it’s
unsafe for everyone in the building,” Mr. Wayss said. “The building
should be evacuated for everyone.”

The Accord called on a
Bangladeshi government review panel to confirm its recommendation that
Florence Fashions be closed, but Accord officials said the government
declined to order a shutdown even though the panel agreed with the
findings.

In an interview, Syed Ahmed, the inspector general for
Bangladesh’s Department of Inspection for Factories and Establishments,
said his department had not received the proper request and records from
the Accord to justify closing Florence.

Mr. Ahmed said he
learned about the Accord’s desire to close Florence only from the
Accord’s website. He said the safety findings detailed on the site were
not official or binding on him.

Mr. Loewen, the Accord’s chief
inspector, said his group’s engineers had met with Mr. Ahmed and
managers of the factories in the building — and later wrote to them —
about urgent safety problems after the initial inspection of the Cherry
factory.

“As far as they’re saying they were never informed, the
inspector general and Florence were at the table right from the get-go,”
Mr. Loewen said. “They’re being a little cute.”

In
the months since the inspections started, some factory owners and
government officials have grown resentful of the Accord’s methods and
accused the group’s officials and engineers of being highhanded and
seeking to dictate to them. But the government, under agreements with
the Accord, is supposed to order any factories closed where conditions
have been deemed unsafe by engineers and confirmed by a review panel.

The
Accord, unlike the Alliance, has some large labor federations and
nongovernment organizations as members, and the Accord has often taken a
tougher stance toward the government and the Bangladeshi garment
manufacturers. The Accord recently tussled with the government over the
strength required for concrete support pillars. Some Accord board
members say the Bangladeshi garment industry has had too much sway over
the government; for years, the industry fought against rigorous
government regulations or inspections.

Worsening tensions, the
Bangladeshi commerce minister and the head of the Bangladesh Garment
Manufacturers and Exporters Association accused Bangladeshi union
leaders this week of undermining the nation’s image and garment industry
by asserting that some labor leaders and pro-union workers have been
tortured, beaten and harassed.

Atiqul Islam, president of the
manufacturers’ association, said in a speech on Monday in Dhaka that the
labor leaders’ complaints were subversive to the state, adding that the
government should punish them.

The widening rift between the
garment industry and labor comes as the Bangladeshi government and
garment industry seek to persuade the Obama administration to restore
trade preferences that were suspended last year because of concerns
about serious safety problems and labor rights violations in the
country’s garment industry.

The American-dominated Alliance has
in many ways been operating on a similar track to the Accord. Ian
Spaulding, a senior adviser to the Alliance, said “a tremendous amount
of progress has been made.” The group has inspected 601 of the 611
factories used by its members, he said, so the Alliance would reach its
goal of having all its factories inspected by July 10.

“The first
phase of our work on inspections and safety training is behind us —
that’s the easy part,” Mr. Spaulding said. “The hard part — remediation —
is now in front of us, getting fire doors installed, getting fire
sprinkler systems, increasing water capacity for fire suppression.”

The
remediation process, garment industry experts say, could lead to
clashes between the Bangladeshi factory owners and the Western brands
about who should pay for needed safety improvements — especially because
many factory owners are expected to say they cannot afford to make the
repairs.

Steven Greenhouse reported from New York and Julfikar Ali Manik from Dhaka.

DETROIT
— Ronald Ford Jr. has watched neighbors move away and brick houses on
his family’s block crumble to nothing, but he says he wants to stay put
and give a chance to city leaders who now promise a renaissance. “I’d
like to try to go with the new Detroit
if that’s really coming,” Mr. Ford, 49, said, standing outside the
house on the city’s east side that he describes as precious, “like a
family heirloom.”

Yet as Mike Duggan, the mayor of the nation’s largest bankrupt city, pledges to stem the flood of departures
that have crippled Detroit and to begin increasing the city’s
population for the first time in decades, Mr. Ford is on the verge of
losing his family’s house. So are tens of thousands of others here who
failed to pay their property taxes.

In a city that desperately needs to hold onto residents, there is a virtual pipeline out. At least 70,000 foreclosures
have taken place since 2009 because of delinquent property taxes. And
more than 43,000 properties — more than one in 10 in this city — were
subject to foreclosure this year, some of them headed for a public
auction where prices can start as low as $500.

Tax foreclosures
have grown so steeply that county officials have lately had to forgo
pursuing tens of thousands of additional properties that have fallen far
enough behind to risk foreclosure.

“It’s more than this office
can handle at this point,” said David Szymanski, the chief deputy for
the Wayne County treasurer’s office, which had so many properties to
foreclose on this year that it held 10 sets of hearings about them in a
convention center auditorium. “We are popping at the seams.”

Other
cities wrestle with unpaid taxes, too, but the size of Detroit’s
problem is staggering. Several factors have brought the city to the
point that crucial revenues are not being collected and thousands of
houses are being taken away each year — not by banks, for failure to
make mortgage payments, but by the government, for failure to pay taxes.
Contributing are soaring rates of poverty, high taxes despite painfully
diminished city services and a long pattern of lackadaisical tax
collection by the city.

In some cases, homeowners have abandoned
properties and simply quit paying taxes, and foreclosure may be the only
way to get a house back into the hands of people who actually want to
live there and pay their share. In other cases, those who lose or
abandon their houses sometimes end up buying other houses at auction —
sometimes for as little as $500 — and begin the cycle again, although
new rules are aimed at taking back properties sooner if taxes are again
not paid. Either way, the city fails to get all the tax revenue it is
owed.

But then there are owners like Mr. Ford who desperately
want to stay. Political leaders here acknowledge that the flood of tax
foreclosures has become a problem, and say they are making efforts to
improve the situation by lowering property assessments — and thus tax
bills — and by trying to help people find steady incomes. But it may not
be enough.

“This whole ecosystem has to be rethought if we’re
going to be effective and sustainable going forward,” said Matt Cullen, a
business executive who took part in a task force,
begun by the White House, aimed at solving Detroit’s crisis of blighted
neighborhoods and abandoned and dilapidated buildings. “How important
is it to take it back on taxes? At what point should you be really
working hard with the owner to keep them in? Fundamentally, if you take
the people out of the home, almost invariably the home ends up being
blighted and taken down.”

Forty-five years ago, Mr. Ford’s family
bought the 1920s-era house for about $17,000. But in recent years, Mr.
Ford said he had struggled to find work and pay even his immediate bills
— for electricity and food — much less overdue property taxes. Though
he was hired in June to do demolition work, Mr. Ford said he did not
have the more than $7,000 he owed in back taxes since 2010 and in
interest and fees, which now amount to 30 percent of that total bill.
This winter, he found a plastic sack hanging on the front door, alerting
him that the house was to be foreclosed on for taxes. It will most
likely be sold at auction this fall unless he finds the money. The bags
speckle the neighborhoods here during certain seasons. “All the wind
came out of me when I saw that,” Mr. Ford said. “I’ve been here since I
was 3. My focus is on finding a way to keep it. But if not, where will I
be? I don’t know.”

In 1999, Michigan changed the way
its localities dealt with people who failed to pay property taxes.
State lawmakers ended a system of tax liens in which the rights to
collect debts were sold to investors, but which often left the titles of
properties murky and, in the time-consuming process, left properties to
decay. Under the new method, homeowners who fell three years behind
could expect to lose their homes.

In Detroit, which lost a quarter of its population in the ten years after 2000
and where those who remained struggled during the recession, more and
more people began falling behind. In 2008, 47,000 properties were
subject to forfeiture, meaning their owners failed to pay taxes for one
year. By 2010, that number hit 86,000. And by 2012, 95,000 properties
had gone unpaid. The county’s required legal announcement of homes in
forfeiture, mostly from Detroit, is reams thicker than most Sunday
newspapers — a fat, gloomy record of a city in foreclosure.

Of
the properties in forfeiture, thousands of owners come up with the money
to pay off their debts. Others qualify for programs aimed at sparing
them from losing their homes, including a state program using federal funds
and a county program that permits extensions of time, as well as
stipulated monthly payment agreements and assistance from nonprofits.
This year, for example, thousands of the more than 43,000 properties
headed for foreclosure had by mid-June been spared. Still on the list:
the owners of more than 26,000 properties — some of whom could not
qualify for assistance or already failed to meet monthly payment plans.

Ted
Phillips, the executive director of United Community Housing Coalition,
where a worn office is regularly crowded with families in search of a
last-ditch way to save their homes, has watched the numbers swell. “If
we don’t make some changes with what we’re doing, I don’t know where
this ends,” Mr. Phillips said.

In a city where 38 percent of
people live below the poverty level, people have often viewed their tax
bills as the least of their problems — particularly as they watch
neighborhoods hollow out but their taxes stay relatively high. And the
interest rate, set by state law, reaches 18 percent by the time
properties are to be foreclosed on, making the prospect of catching up
more remote.

It is difficult to compare tax foreclosure rates on a
national scale. States use a range of time frames and methods to handle
unpaid taxes. In Michigan, Wayne County, which includes Detroit, has
the highest number of properties foreclosed on for taxes by far; Genesee
County, Mich., the second highest, saw 2,769 foreclosed on in 2013, state records show,
while 17,965 were ultimately foreclosed on the same year in Wayne
County.“By any measure, this number of tax sale properties for a city
the size of Detroit is extraordinary,” said John Rao, a lawyer with the
Boston-based National Consumer Law Center.

For
some, the remarkable churn of tax foreclosures here has become just one
more game in a city where the unwritten rules of survival are unlike
any other. Some investors have purchased properties at auctions, only to
continue skipping payments but collect rent or resell. Renata Lewis,
33, said she agreed to purchase a home from a family acquaintance by
making payments over a period of time. It was to be the first home she
had ever owned, and she has decorated the inside with purple accents and
stencils with messages like “Dream Wish Imagine.”

Not long
after, she learned that the house was drastically behind on taxes. Ms.
Lewis, who has three children, said she was struggling to make monthly
payments of $858 to cover the old bills.

“When I moved in here, I
felt like I finally did something right,” Ms. Lewis said. “But now I
feel like I messed up. They knew what was going on with this house
already. Here I went and paid for this house and now I can lose it?”

There
have been efforts to remake Michigan’s rules, including measures to
require those who purchase properties at auction to keep tax payments up
to date. “A lot of it gets back to the basics of economic growth and
having jobs,” Gov. Rick Snyder said of the larger issue. “We’re getting
people to work.”

Mayor Duggan’s administration recently lowered
assessments around the city, and it is in the middle of a
property-by-property look at values that could further affect tax bills
by the end of 2016. “His first priority is keeping Detroiters in their
homes and in the city,” said John Roach, the mayor’s spokesman.

Patricia
Adams said she already was seeing upbeat signs for her city, such as
increased trash removal. If police protection can improve, she said, she
believed Mr. Duggan’s vision for growing Detroit could yet be possible.
But for her, it may be too late.

Ms. Adams owes more than
$20,000 in back taxes and interest. Obligations for payment plans have
not been met, county officials said, despite generous extensions. Her
plan now is really just a hope — that she can buy her own house back
during the auction this fall.

MIAMI
— With new DNA evidence in hand, a divided Florida Supreme Court on
Thursday overturned the death sentence and conviction of Paul C.
Hildwin, a man found guilty nearly three decades ago of strangling a
woman in Hernando County, Fla. The woman, Vronzettie Cox, 42, whose body
was found in the trunk of a car, had been raped.

The DNA
evidence found on Ms. Cox’s underwear and a washcloth at the scene
matches that of her former boyfriend, William Haverty. Mr. Haverty is in
prison serving a sentence for attempted sexual battery of a child.

The State Supreme Court ordered a new trial for Mr. Hildwin, 54. It remained unclear if prosecutors would seek to retry him.

During
Mr. Hildwin’s murder trial, prosecutors told jurors that the type of
DNA found at the scene was unusual and consistent with Mr. Hildwin’s. No
evidence of a direct match was offered. Subsequent testing in 2003 made
it clear the DNA did not match Mr. Hildwin. But it was not until 2010,
when the Florida Supreme Court ordered the state to run the DNA against
the national database, that a match was made: It was Mr. Haverty’s.

“We
cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that a significant pillar of the
state’s case, as presented to the jury, has collapsed and that this same
evidence actually supports the defense,” the Florida Supreme Court
wrote in its 5-2 decision on Thursday.

Mr. Hildwin, who had been
riding with the couple in their car in 1985 before the murder, was
arrested after cashing one of Ms. Cox’s checks. He had stolen the
checkbook from Ms. Cox’s car. Mr. Hildwin told the police and
prosecutors that as he got out of the parked car, the couple was
arguing, and Mr. Haverty was trying to choke his girlfriend.

“The
DNA evidence, Mr. Haverty’s criminal background and statements by
witnesses who prove the crime couldn’t have occurred when originally
thought, make it obviously clear that law enforcement went after the
wrong person,” said Marty McClain, the local court-appointed lawyer who
worked with the Innocence Project.

After
the man was finished raping the 20-year-old college student and
searching her apartment for money, he announced that he had to kill or
blind her. He held an ice pick to her eyes, then found a blade. Already
he had bound her with telephone wire ripped from the wall.

“Ankle
to wrist,” the woman recalled on Thursday, 25 years later. “He put some
paper towels on my eyes. I was kneeling and he was cutting at my eyes.”

She asked to be identified as Katherine.

The man, Matias Reyes,
had followed her into an apartment on Madison Avenue in the East 90s on
July 19, 1989. He had already raped two women in Central Park in April
and two more in June, killing one, a pregnant mother whose children were
in the next room.

One of Mr. Reyes’s victims in April, a woman he had raped and beaten nearly to death, was the Central Park jogger.

On
Thursday, the city comptroller approved a payment of $40.7 million to
settle the claim of five men wrongly convicted as teenagers in the
attack.By the time Mr. Reyes found Katherine, three months after the
attack on the jogger, he had started cutting at and around women’s eyes.
He did not succeed in blinding them. “I just sort of collapsed,”
Katherine said. “He got up and walked out of the room.”

Unsure if
he had left the apartment, she waited a while, then managed to free one
limb from the cord. She got to a window and screamed for help.

“People
on Madison Avenue started to gravitate toward the window, like some
sort of sci-fi film,” she said. “There was blood dripping down both
eyes.”

Ten days later, Mr. Reyes followed another woman into the
hallway of her building on 95th Street and Lexington, but a neighbor
interrupted the attack. Finally, on Aug. 5, he followed a woman into an
apartment on 91st Street between Lexington and Third Avenues, and raped
her several times. She was able to escape. A building worker and
neighbor confronted Mr. Reyes and held him at bay with a broomstick
until the police arrived.

Katherine recalled that Detective Bruno
Francisi and an assistant district attorney, Peter Casolaro, handled
her case “with complete kindness and respect and thoroughness.” “I had
to go in front of the grand jury and I saw one of the other girls, whose
head was bandaged,” Katherine said.

Ultimately, Mr. Reyes
pleaded guilty to several of the rapes and the murder, but he was not
questioned about two attacks in Central Park: the assault on the jogger
on April 19 and on another woman April 17. The jogger had been beaten so
severely that she had no memory of the attack, and by the time Mr.
Reyes was arrested in August, the police had rounded up teenagers who
had been making trouble in the park that night and gotten confessions
from them.

The police appeared to have lost track of Mr. Reyes
after the jogger attack, even though he had been identified as a suspect
in the rape two days before. The victim had noticed three stitches on
his chin, and detectives got Mr. Reyes’s identity and address from
hospital records but were unable to find him. The victim left the city.
The sex crime detective on the case was transferred. The case folder was
stamped “closed” around the end of June, even though no arrest had been
made.

The jogger case was handled by a separate unit of detectives who specialized in homicide investigations.

Not
until 13 years later, in 2002, did Mr. Reyes admit to the two rapes in
the park, which physical and circumstantial evidence confirmed.

Katherine recalled being contacted in 2002 by Mr. Casolaro, who
apologetically asked her to describe how she had been bound. The jogger
had been tied up in a similar way with her own clothes.

Katherine finished college on time, never taking a break, putting the assault into a kind of deep freeze.

“I
isolated myself,” she said. “That proved not to be good at all. I kind
of lost the ability to reach in and tell the story, as it was — raw and
from my heart.”

She was stunned by the news that the same man who attacked her had been implicated in the Central Park jogger case. “It turned me upside down.”

The
lost opportunities to arrest Mr. Reyes were recounted in “The Central
Park Five,” a book by Sarah Burns that became the basis of a documentary
by Ms. Burns; her father, Ken Burns; and her husband, David McMahon.

“It
was yet another word of an earthquake,” Katherine said. “The same
system that hurt those five also damaged me. I’m still sort of
dismantled by this.”

The
New York City comptroller’s office announced on Thursday that it had
approved a settlement of the longstanding lawsuit by five men whose
convictions were overturned in the brutal 1989 beating and rape of a female jogger in Central Park.

“In
my judgment, this settlement is a prudent and equitable solution for
all parties to the lawsuit and closes a very difficult chapter in our
city’s history,” the comptroller, Scott M. Stringer, said in a
statement.

The statement did not say how much the five plaintiffs would receive, but The New York Times reported last week
that the figure was about $40 million, an amount that averages roughly
$1 million for each year the five men spent in prison. Four of the men
served about seven years, while one, Kharey Wise,
served about 13 years. Under that calculation, the city was poised to
pay more to Mr. Wise than it has in any wrongful conviction case.Lawyers
for the city and the plaintiffs are expected to complete the paperwork
and make a filing before Judge Deborah A. Batts of United States
District Court in Manhattan, who has been overseeing the litigation that
has lasted for over a decade. The city, in defending the lawsuit, had
argued that the police and prosecutors acted in good faith and should
not be held liable.

There was no comment from Mayor Bill de
Blasio on Thursday. During his campaign and since taking office, he has
called repeatedly for the case to be settled. On Monday, asked about
reports of a settlement agreement, Mr. de Blasio said: “I think that the
moral issue is quite clear, and obviously was made very real by the
court decisions in recent years, and an injustice was done. And we have a
moral obligation to respond to that injustice.”

The agreement
was negotiated by the city’s corporation counsel, Zachary W. Carter,
along with the lawyers for the five men, who also include Kevin
Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Raymond Santana Jr.

Jonathan
C. Moore, one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, said that he was pleased to
hear of the comptroller’s action. “Although the settlement is for a
substantial amount of money,” Mr. Moore said, “no amount of money can
erase the injustice that was done to these young men and their families
back in 1989.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Carter said Thursday that he had no comment on the decision.

One
of the defendants in the case, Linda Fairstein, a former senior
prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, also declined to
comment. On Wednesday, she was asked about a settlement during an
appearance on NBC’s “Today” show.

She said that she could speak
more freely after a settlement was complete. But she said lawyers for
the city had “looked us all in the eye and said, ‘There is absolutely no
evidence of police or prosecutorial wrongdoing.’ ”

New
York University and the government of Abu Dhabi said this week that an
investigative firm headed by a former federal prosecutor had been hired
to conduct an inquiry into labor conditions at the university’s new
Middle East campus.

The move comes a month after The New York Times reported on widespread labor abuses in the construction of N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi, which opens to students in the fall. The firm, Nardello & Company,
which has offices around the world, will “conduct an independent review
of allegations of labor violations,” N.Y.U. announced on Wednesday,
“with a focus on those recently reported in the media.”

Daniel
Nardello, the company’s founder, will lead the inquiry. In an interview,
he said that he had not yet settled on any methodology, but that his
team would include staff members from London and Dubai who had expertise
in the region. “I assume that I will have wide access to speak to the
people I need to speak to,” Mr. Nardello said.In promotional materials,
Mr. Nardello’s firm says it specializes in helping “law firms, financial
institutions, corporations and high-net-worth individuals” find
“information that lies below the surface,” particularly in matters like
compliance with anticorruption laws, the location of missing assets and
the gathering of strategic intelligence.

The firm’s website
features a case study in which “a leading European company was concerned
by poor construction standards and working conditions at the site of
its project in an Arabian Gulf state.” The firm, the website continues,
“helped our client approach a powerful royal who interceded
successfully” The firm also emphasizes discretion, promoting itself as
“your best kept secret.”

Nardello & Company was selected by
Tamkeen, the government entity that oversaw construction of N.Y.U. Abu
Dhabi. Mr. Nardello declined to comment on any details of the
investigative process, including whether Tamkeen officials would be
briefed about the investigation along the way. But Mr. Nardello, a
former federal prosecutor in New York and a graduate of N.Y.U. Law
School, emphasized that the investigation would unfold on its own terms.

“My mandate is to do it independently and to do it thoroughly,” he said.

When
N.Y.U. began planning its 21-building campus, it announced a number of
safeguards to protect the rights of the thousands of South Asian
construction workers who were brought to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the
United Arab Emirates, by local construction firms. Its Statement of Labor Values
promised fair wages, reasonable hours, decent accommodations, the right
of every worker to hold onto his own passport and the right to object
when those promises were not met. An outside firm was hired to monitor
compliance with those values, and it published a series of positive
annual reports.

But in May, an investigation by The Times found
that almost all workers had been charged steep recruitment fees (usually
of about a year’s wages) to get their jobs, that few were being paid
what they had been promised, that some lived in miserable conditions and
that a group of workers who went on a two-day strike were arrested,
jailed, beaten and deported.

After the publication of that report, N.Y.U. apologized to workers who had been mistreated and “committed to investigating vigorously the issues The Times has raised and reporting the findings transparently.”

A
full accounting of how the men who built N.Y.U. Abu Dhabi were treated
faces considerable challenges. At its peak, 6,000 laborers were working
on the project, but the total number was much higher, since many
laborers cycled through and on to other construction sites. Since the
campus was completed in the spring, all of those men have moved on — to
different projects in the country or region, or back home to villages
and cities in South Asia. As for the construction companies that
employed them, they have continuing contracts in Abu Dhabi, an absolute
monarchy with little tradition of labor rights.

Mr. Nardello declined to set a precise date for the investigation’s end; he said his intention was to finish by year’s end.

Kristina
Bogos, a senior who studied in Abu Dhabi and is a member of the
Coalition for Fair Labor at N.Y.U., said she was “very interested in
seeing the results of this investigation,” but cautioned that
fact-finding should be only one step in a longer process.

“N.Y.U.
has a responsibility to use its resources to be proactive about human
rights and fair labor standards,” she said, including reforming the
foreign labor system of the Emirates.

A
new study published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology
has uncovered a new link between childhood obesity and poverty.
Previous studies have shown that approximately one-third of American
children are overweight. The new study shows that after age two,
neighborhood poverty, rather than family poverty, has a more significant
impact on the likelihood that a child will be obese.

Researchers
studied 1,000 children aged 2 to 6 1/2 who were born with low birth
weights. Researchers analyzed demographic factors as well as changes in
their body mass index (BMI). Studies have shown that children who gain
weight quickly, prior to their first birthday, experience an increased
risk of obesity, which means infants born with low birth weights face
higher risks for obesity. Being a low income minority who lives in a
low income neighborhood compounds this risk.

Study
co-author and Professor of Human Ecology Gary W. Evans states, “The
effects of neighborhood poverty on children’s weight may be just as
important as the effects of family poverty. Children and families are
embedded in neighborhoods; poor neighborhoods differ structurally from
wealthier neighborhoods, with fewer safe and natural places to play and
exercise, fewer supermarkets and more fast food.” For children who
lived in low income neighborhoods, their BMIs increased at a quicker
rate than children who lived in more affluent neighborhoods.

Evans
goes on to state, “Health disparities emerge early and shape lifelong
health. Interventions need to address both the fundamental risk factors
for pediatric obesity, such as poverty, chaotic living conditions and
low parental education, as well as the mechanisms that appear to convey
these risks, such as restricted access to healthy food, few safe and
natural places to stay, too much fast food, child food marketing and
high levels of chronic stress.”

JERUSALEM
— Two Palestinian men suspected of being militants were killed in an
Israeli missile strike in Gaza on Friday, according to the military and
witnesses, and Israel’s minister of defense warned that he would not
tolerate rocket fire from Gaza against Israel or any other attempt to
harm Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Earlier Friday, an explosive
device was detonated against Israeli forces operating near the border
fence with Gaza, causing no casualties, according to the military. The
forces responded with tank fire that wounded five Palestinians,
including a woman and a boy, 11, who was seriously wounded from shrapnel
but was in stable condition after surgery, according to Ashraf
al-Qedra, a spokesman for the Ministry of Health in Gaza. Witnesses said
the shells also damaged the minarets of two mosques.

“We will
pursue and strike with force anyone who acts or plans to act against us,
as we did today,” Moshe Yaalon, the Israeli defense minister, said in a
statement.The attacks and stern warning came against a background of
simmering tensions along the Israel-Gaza border in the two weeks since
three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped in the West Bank.

Israel has blamed Hamas,
the Islamic militant group that dominates Gaza, for the abduction.
Alongside the search for the missing youths, its military has conducted a
campaign of arrests and raids across the West Bank aimed at weakening
Hamas’s infrastructure there.

The events in the West Bank have
been accompanied by more rocket fire from Gaza into Israel and
retaliatory airstrikes by the Israelis. The Israeli military said it had
attacked more than 20 sites it described as “terror targets” across
Gaza in retaliation for at least 26 rockets launched against Israel.

Of
those, at least 15 hit Israeli territory, causing no casualties; five
were intercepted by Israel’s missile defense system; and others fell
short and landed in Gaza, one of them apparently killing a 3-year-old girl. A few Palestinians were injured in the Israeli airstrikes, mostly from broken glass.

Mr.
Qedra of the Gaza Health Ministry identified the two men killed on
Friday as Osama al-Hussomi, 29, and Muhammed al-Fasih, 24. The Israeli
military said they were involved in firing rockets in recent weeks and
were planning further attacks against Israelis.

There was no
immediate statement from any militant group in Gaza claiming them as
members, but they were buried wrapped in the black flags of the radical
Islamic Salafi movement.

The men were riding in a car west of
Gaza City at the time of the strike, which took place about 50 yards
from the home of the former Hamas prime minister of Gaza, Ismail Haniya,
in the Beach refugee camp.

Witnesses said an Israeli drone fired a missile at the car, a silver Kia Forte.

“I heard the sound of a blast, I turned round and saw the front part of the car burning,” said Shadi Massoud, 24.

Mr.
Massoud said the driver’s body was thrown out of the car, which
continued driving for a few yards until it crashed into a wall. Among
the debris were two trays of rice and chicken covered with aluminum
foil, the yellow grains of rice scattered on the ground.

Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem, and Fares Akram from Gaza.

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13) Case of James Risen, Times Reporter, Poses Dilemma for Justice Department

On Dec. 31, 2005, the C.I.A.’s
acting general counsel, John A. Rizzo, received an urgent phone call
from the White House about a chapter in James Risen’s coming book,
“State of War,” detailing a botched C.I.A. operation in Iran.

The
administration wanted Mr. Rizzo to contact Sumner Redstone — the
chairman of Viacom, owner of the book’s publisher, Simon & Schuster —
and ask him to keep the book off the market.

Mr. Rizzo never made the call. It was too late. Copies of “State of War” had already reached bookstores.

The
Bush administration soon identified the man it believed was responsible
for leaking the information in the book, and in 2008 it subpoenaed Mr.
Risen, a reporter for The New York Times, to identify his source.After
more than six years of legal wrangling, the case — the most serious
confrontation between the government and the press in recent history —
will reach a head in the coming weeks. Mr. Risen has steadfastly refused
to testify. But he is now out of challenges. Early this month, the Supreme Court declined to review his case, a decision that allows prosecutors to compel his testimony. If Mr. Risen resists, he could go to prison.

Though
the court’s decision looked like a major victory for the government, it
has forced the Obama administration to confront a hard choice. Should
it demand Mr. Risen’s testimony and be responsible for a reporter’s
being sent to jail? Or reverse course and stand down, losing credibility
with an intelligence community that has pushed for the aggressive
prosecution of leaks?

The dilemma comes at a critical moment for
an administration that has struggled to find a balance between
aggressively enforcing laws against leaking and demonstrating concern
for civil liberties and government transparency. Whatever the Justice
Department chooses to do will send a powerful message about how far it
is willing to go to protect classified information in the digital age.
And journalists and press freedom activists are watching closely for the
precedent the decision will most likely set.

“If the government
proceeds and pursues the subpoena, especially if Mr. Risen goes to jail
or is fined at some intolerable level, it will deal a withering blow to
reporting that runs against the government’s wishes,” said Steven
Aftergood, who studies government secrecy for the nonprofit Federation of American Scientists.

Arguments
over the First Amendment can be esoteric, but the specter of a
reporter’s going to jail adds an element of personal consequence and
real-world drama to the debate. The last reporter to be sent to prison
for refusing to disclose a source was Judith Miller in 2005; then a
reporter for The Times, Ms. Miller served 85 days in jail for initially
refusing to testify in a case involving the disclosure of a covert
C.I.A. operative.

Several weeks ago, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.hinted that prosecutors might not seek to imprison
Mr. Risen if he defies his subpoena, though Mr. Holder’s statement was
by no means definitive. “As long as I’m attorney general, no reporter
who is doing his job is going to go to jail,” he said in a meeting with a
group of journalists.

On the advice of his lawyer, Mr. Risen, 59, declined to comment for this article. But during a speech in February in Boston, he said he had two choices: “Give up everything I believe in — or go to jail.”

Mr.
Risen’s legal travails have played out against the backdrop of
WikiLeaks and Edward J. Snowden, intensifying the debate over the
disclosure of national security secrets. Defenders of press freedom
argue that unsanctioned leaks help hold administrations accountable for
their actions, and that reporters depend on confidential sources to get
important information to the public. Critics of these leaks say they are
not only illegal but also can jeopardize the government’s ability to
keep the public safe.

President Obama
has found himself at the center of this debate. After he entered office
celebrating whistle-blowing as an act of “courage and patriotism,” his
administration has prosecuted eight government employees for leaking
classified information — more than all previous administrations
combined.

During the course of leak investigations, the
government has largely avoided courtroom showdowns with reporters. But
two cases that surfaced last year prompted outrage among journalists. In
one, the Justice Department obtained Associated Press phone records; in the other, an F.B.I. agent labeled a Fox News reporter, James Rosen, a criminal co-conspirator in a search warrant for his email.

In
response to the uproar, the administration has revised Justice
Department regulations to offer reporters more protection from
government investigators.

David Pozen, an associate law professor
at Columbia University who studies leaks, said the government’s next
move in Mr. Risen’s case could signal a tipping point in how it pursues
these prosecutions. “If they let Risen go,” Mr. Pozen said, “it would
suggest that however else they try to bring these criminal-leak cases
going forward, journalists will largely be shielded.”

The failed C.I.A. action at the heart of Mr. Risen’s reporting was intended to sabotage Iran’s nuclear weapons
program. Intelligence officials assigned a former Russian scientist who
had defected to the United States to deliver a set of faulty blueprints
for a nuclear device to an Iranian scientist. But the Russian scientist
became nervous and informed the Iranians that the plans were flawed.

The Times considered publishing an article about the operation in 2003, when Mr. Risen first learned about it, but President George W. Bush’s
national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, prevailed upon the
newspaper to withhold publication for the sake of national security.

“We
weighed the government’s concerns and the usual editorial
considerations and decided not to run the story at that time,” said a
spokeswoman for The Times, Danielle Rhoades Ha.

Mr. Risen broke
the story a few years later in his book. In the intervening period, it
had come to light that the administration had built its case for going
to war in Iraq on the basis of faulty intelligence about the country’s nuclear weapons program. There was also growing speculation that the United States might be planning for a possible conflict in Iran.

As
Mr. Risen wrote in one legal filing, “The competence of intelligence
operations concerning Iran’s nuclear capabilities was something that the
public needed to examine.”

The C.I.A. refers possible leak cases
to the Justice Department on an almost weekly basis. A vast majority
are never investigated. According to Mr. Rizzo, though, relatively few
people possessed Mr. Risen’s detailed knowledge of the Iran operation.

The government quickly zeroed in on a disgruntled former C.I.A. agent, Jeffrey Sterling. In 2010, federal prosecutors charged Mr. Sterling
with disclosing classified information to a reporter. His trial was
scheduled to begin in 2011 in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va.,
but the fight over Mr. Risen’s testimony has delayed the proceedings.

When
the Bush administration first subpoenaed Mr. Risen in early 2008, he
was already well known inside the White House. He was one of two
reporters for The Times who in 2005 broke the news that Mr. Bush’s
government had conducted warrantless wiretapping of American citizens.
Mr. Bush described the reporting on the wiretapping program as
“shameful.” Nevertheless, the revelations led to greater judicial
oversight of electronic eavesdropping.

The Obama administration
has also tried to force Mr. Risen to disclose how he learned the
information in his book. Mr. Risen has received two additional
subpoenas, one to testify before a grand jury, the other to testify at Mr. Sterling’s trial.

After
a trial court judge largely quashed his third subpoena in late 2010,
the Justice Department successfully challenged the ruling in a federal
appeals court, arguing that the First Amendment does not afford any
special protections to journalists. The administration then urged the
Supreme Court not to review Mr. Risen’s case.

“I was surprised that the Obama administration continued to pursue the notion of Risen testifying,” said Mr. Rizzo, who recently published a memoir
about his years in the C.I.A. in which he devoted several pages to the
controversy surrounding Mr. Risen’s book. “They were declassifying
torture memos. There was going to be transparency. It was a new leaf
they were going to turn over.”

Defenders of the government’s war
on leaks argue that advances in technology and the expansion of the
intelligence bureaucracy since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have made
heightened vigilance necessary. Daniel Ellsberg had to photocopy the
Pentagon Papers one page at a time; Mr. Snowden was able to access
hundreds of thousands of highly classified documents on the National
Security Agency’s computer networks. As of 2011, more than 4.2 million
people both inside and outside the government held security clearances.

“It’s
kind of a small response to a giant problem,” Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard
law professor who was a senior Justice Department official in the Bush
administration, said of the Obama administration’s leak cases. “These
prosecutions are the responses of a bureaucracy that’s at its wits’ end
at how to deal with all of these leaks.”

Activists for freedom of
the press have been encouraged by some of the White House’s recent
actions and talk. In May last year, Mr. Obama described leaks as
dangerous but said he was “troubled by the possibility that leak
investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds
government accountable.”

The president has also expressed support
for legislation — a so-called shield law — that guarantees certain
protections for journalists, but would contain exceptions related to
national security.

For now, the administration faces a more pressing issue: What to do about Mr. Risen?

The
government is expected to resume its case soon against Mr. Sterling. If
Mr. Risen refuses to testify, the Justice Department has options beyond
seeking a prison sentence. It could ask the judge to fine Mr. Risen. Or
it could agree to narrow the scope of questioning so that he would not
be asked to identify his source.

Government lawyers could also try to avoid the issue altogether by pursuing a plea agreement with Mr. Sterling.

“The
prosecutors who have invested so much in this probably want to charge
ahead,” said Mr. Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.
“It’s just a question of whether politics will put some brakes on them.”

ARIVACA,
Ariz. — Every time Jack Driscoll drives the 32 miles from this remote
outpost in southeastern Arizona to the closest supermarket, or to
doctor’s appointments, or to a pharmacy to fill his prescriptions, he
must stop at a Border Patrol checkpoint and answer the same question: “Are you a U.S. citizen?”

Sometimes,
Border Patrol agents ask where he is going or coming from, the type of
car he is driving, what is in that bag on the back seat or what brings
him to these parts, even though he has lived here for more than a year.
Lately Mr. Driscoll, a 75-year-old retired highway construction
engineer, has taken to opening his window just a crack and yelling, “I’m
American,” as he stops at the checkpoint, one of the ways he has found
to protest.He is not the only one in this community of 800 whose anger
is boiling over. Although checkpoints are a fact of life here — the
tollbooth-like way stations are part of the routine for anyone driving
the highways near the border — citizens like Mr. Driscoll are now
starting to raise questions about whether the familiar but irritating
routine violates their constitutional rights, which include protections
against arbitrary stops and searches.

“I’m a mostly honest
person,” Mr. Driscoll said in an interview at the library here, his arms
crossed over his chest. “I worked hard all my life. I paid my taxes. I
even stop at stop signs, and I feel like they treat me like a criminal.”

For
several years, three checkpoints have surrounded Arivaca, an
unincorporated community 11 miles north of the Mexican border that has a
clinic, but no hospital; a library, but no schools; and a general store
that sells basic provisions. There is no way in or out that does not
take you through a checkpoint, an experience that bears some resemblance
to going through airport security (albeit more briefly, and not
everyone gets searched).

This year, volunteers organized,
gathering hundreds of signatures and picketing outside the Border Patrol
offices in Tucson to try to get the checkpoints removed, to no avail.
For several months, small groups monitored the busiest of the area’s
checkpoints, on Arivaca Road, noting things like the length of the
stops, the questions asked and the number of drivers pulled aside for a
search of their vehicle and belongings.

“We didn’t see any
arrests,” said one of the volunteers, Peter Ragan, 52, a landscaper who
has lived in Arivaca for 12 years. “There were no undocumented people
apprehended at the checkpoint, no drugs interdicted, no murderers,
rapists or terrorists we were defended against, as far as we could see.”

Under
a ruling by the Supreme Court, the Border Patrol is allowed to conduct
random stops and searches within 100 miles of the border, a power that
the agency says is critical to its task of keeping drugs, guns and
people from illegally entering the country.

The Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection,
said in a statement that existing laws give its agents broad powers to
question and arrest people and to seize evidence, and that those powers
are not bound by geographic restrictions. The agents, the statement
said, “enforce the nation’s laws while preserving the civil rights and
civil liberties of all people” with whom they interact.

But in
Arivaca, residents say they live in a constant state of scrutiny. At
first, they say, the checkpoints seemed like a mere inconvenience, the
price to pay for living in a community located in one of the biggest
smuggling corridors in the Southwest. But after years of virtually daily
stops and questions, with no exceptions made, the checkpoints came to
seem more like intrusions. Because the border agents who staff them are
on duty for only a few weeks, their relationship to the community has
never evolved beyond an adversarial one.

“You don’t know what’s
going to happen when you pull up to the checkpoint at any given time,
and that’s very unnerving,” said Carlota Wray, 57, who has lived in
Arivaca for 33 years.

Ms. Wray recalled one morning some weeks
ago that she got so flustered by the question she was asked at the
checkpoint — “They wanted to know if I owned the car I was driving,” she
said — that she forgot to drop off at her grandson’s school the folder
he had forgotten at home. She has also spent time monitoring the
checkpoints.

The Border Patrol operates 34 permanent checkpoints
along the southern border and it is capable of operating 182 tactical,
or temporary, checkpoints installed along well-established smuggling
routes, officials said.

Some of those checkpoints, like the ones
that ring Arivaca, operate under canopy tents set up on the side of
country roads flanked by wilderness and pasture, a cramped
air-conditioned trailer offering the agents’ only respite from the
oppressive desert heat. Others stretch along all lanes of major highways
that lead from Mexico into the United States, visible from many miles
away and, for drivers, virtually impossible to avoid.As motorists
approach, cones corral their vehicles, organizing them into lanes, if
there is room, or in single file. Signs warn of decreasing speed limits:
45 m.p.h., 25 m.p.h. Agents and drug-sniffing dogs stand at the ready
at the spot where the vehicle must stop.

Every morning at the
checkpoint on Arivaca Road, about 25 miles from the Mexican border and
about 20 miles from the center of this community, school buses full of
children get stopped. A minibus that takes older residents on weekly
shopping trips also gets stopped.

Unlike frequent border
crossers, who carry cards granting them faster entry in the United
States, there is no special designation for drivers who frequently pass
through checkpoints. The thinking is that anyone could be a smuggler, so
everyone must be stopped.

Elsewhere, others have also taken action against checkpoints. Outside Las Cruces, N.M., the American Civil Liberties Union Regional Center for Border Rights posted volunteers at a rest stop past one of the checkpoints that hug the city, on Interstate 25, to educate motorists
about their constitutional rights as they go through the checkpoints.
In Texas, some drivers at checkpoints on Interstate 35 in Laredo simply refused to answer questions from border agents, telling them things like, “Did I stumble into Mexico or is this the United States?”

The
checkpoints have been most successful at finding drugs, seizing 342,624
pounds of marijuana in fiscal 2013, or 14 percent of the 2.4 million
pounds of marijuana confiscated by the agents along the northern and
southern borders. They were also responsible for intercepting more than
half of the heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine seized by the Border
Patrol over the past four fiscal years, the statistics show.

But
only 2 percent of the unauthorized immigrants captured by the Border
Patrol in each of the past four fiscal years were apprehended at
checkpoints, according to statistics provided by Customs and Border
Protection. There were 9,510 such apprehensions in fiscal 2013, out of
420,789 apprehensions by the agency.

Here, the citizen monitors
have been poring over the information they compiled, mapping out the
frequency with which the same drivers were stopped and trying to assess
whether Hispanic drivers were held longer than white ones. They are not
quite sure what they will find, said Mr. Ragan, the 12-year resident,
but they do know one thing: If the purpose of the checkpoints is to
seize illegal drugs, firearms and immigrants, “in the time that we
observed, they accomplished none.”

Adults with children caught crossing the border illegally in the Rio
Grande Valley will be sent initially to Customs and Border Protection
stations in Laredo and El Paso, and also to San Diego and El Centro in
California, border officials said Friday. Families will be booked for
deportation at those sites, and some will remain in detention. Facing a
surge of Central American migrants in South Texas, border authorities
have been releasing most families with children there. They will soon
open a 700-bed detention center for families at a law enforcement
training center in Artesia, N.M.

Detroit’s largest union — the American Federation of State, County and
Municipal Employees — and the city’s emergency manager on Friday signed
an agreement reached during the continuing municipal bankruptcy case.
The five-year labor pact promises to restore wage cuts that workers took
as the city careened into the nation’s largest-ever municipal
bankruptcy. The Detroit Free Press reported that under the new
contracts, workers will receive a 5-percent pay raise as of July 1.

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17) Rations Reduced as Demand Grows for Soup Kitchens
"The New York City Coalition Against Hunger
has estimated that one in six city residents are “food insecure,” or
living in homes where there is not enough money to put enough food on
the table."

Old
Cantonese women lined up behind a white van, clutching plastic bags to
carry away their meals for the night. Behind them came young children
clamoring for milk, homeless men in tattered shirts and Mexican
immigrants who spoke only Spanish.

“No oranges?” a woman asked.

The
oranges were all gone. With a sigh, the woman held open her bag for the
remaining ration at the mobile soup kitchen: a cup of warm turkey stew,
a carton of low-fat milk, bagels and rolls.

The kitchen, parked
on Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan, dispensed 130 free meals in less
than 15 minutes on Tuesday night, one-third more than it did on a
similar night a year ago. It is part of a nightly food run by the Coalition for the Homeless, a nonprofit group, that is drawing bigger crowds than ever before in some neighborhoods in Manhattan and the Bronx.

“It’s
been steadily increasing,” said Juan De La Cruz, the food program
director for the coalition. “There will be nights when we run short of
food.”

The coalition is seeking to expand its feeding efforts
amid growing concern among some government officials and advocates for
the poor about what they see as a hunger crisis in a city known for its
five-star dining and culinary excesses.

The New York City Coalition Against Hunger
has estimated that one in six city residents are “food insecure,” or
living in homes where there is not enough money to put enough food on
the table. In a 2013 survey, the group reported that 254 food pantries
and soup kitchens had seen demand increase 10 percent, on average, over
the previous year.

“The hunger crisis in New York is the worst
that it’s been in decades,” said Joel Berg, the group’s executive
director, adding that people had already been struggling in a tough
economy before their food stamps were reduced last fall, when federal
cuts were made to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

Mayor
Bill de Blasio, who has characterized New York’s inequities as a “Tale
of Two Cities,” and his administration have taken steps to get more food
into the hands of the poor. The Human Resources Administration
announced in May that it would seek to increase enrollment for food
stamps — about 1.8 million residents currently receive them — by
reaching out to older Medicare recipients and expanding online services,
among other measures.

In a significant change, human resources
officials also received a waiver last month of a federal work rule that
cut off food stamps to thousands of New Yorkers a year. Under that rule,
more than 46,000 so-called able-bodied adults — ages 18 to 49 with no
dependents — had to work at least 20 hours a week or participate in job
training to continue receiving an average of $35 a week in food stamps
after three months, according to city officials.

“It made no
sense to make New Yorkers go hungry as punishment for being
underemployed — working less than 20 hours a week — or being unable to
find employment in a continuing difficult economy,” said Steven Banks,
commissioner of the agency. He added that the cost of having more people
on food stamps would be covered entirely by federal aid and that the
local economy would only benefit from more dollars being spent at
groceries and bodegas.

In the Bronx, Jonathan Callender, a former
sanitation worker, said he lost $189 a month in food stamps in March
because he could not work. Since then, Mr. Callender, 50, who said he
had asthma and chronic back pain, has been going every day to a soup
kitchen run by Part of the Solution,
a nonprofit group, so that he could eat. “There isn’t nothing I can do
right now because I have to take care of my health first,” he said.

The
Coalition for the Homeless feeds up to 1,200 people a night during the
summer, its busiest time. Meals to go are handed out at St.
Bartholomew’s Church on Park Avenue and carried by three vans to more
than two dozen preset locations. The feeding program, which costs about
$750,000 a year, is financed with government funds, foundation grants
and private donations.

Dane Hudson, 24, an unemployed diesel
mechanic who has been staying with friends in the Bronx and Brooklyn,
said that most nights he went to the church because his food stamps were
not enough to cover his meals for the month. “It’s hard in this city,”
he said. “You really see the line between the haves and the have-nots.”

An
army of volunteers serves the meals night after night. At precisely 7
p.m. on Tuesday, Fernell High slid behind the wheel of a van loaded with
380 meals. Mr. High, 43, a building engineer, said he saw homeless
people camped out at Grand Central Terminal nearly two decades ago, and
rather than just step over them, decided he wanted to help.

As he
drove up to the first stop, on 35th Street under the Franklin D.
Roosevelt Drive, two dozen people stood waiting. “I can save my money
instead of buying food,” said Timm Tyler, 50, who was laid off from his
job as a clerk at a health center this spring and lives in a nearby
shelter. “The bottom line is they need more programs like this.”

Later,
on Lafayette Street, an eager crowd swarmed around as Mr. High jumped
out of the van, threw open the back doors and called for order as he
handed out plastic bags. One woman, saying she was old, tried to push
past him. “Everybody’s old,” he replied. “You still have to wait.”

By 9 p.m. the food was gone. Mr. High did not bother driving to the last stop, outside Pennsylvania Station.

Three
of the five men whose convictions were overturned in the 1989 beating
and rape of a female jogger in Central Park appeared in front of City
Hall on Friday, thanking their supporters and praising Mayor Bill de
Blasio for agreeing to settle their longstanding lawsuit against the
city.

“You
all tried to dehumanize us as human beings,” Mr. Richardson said, his
voice cracking as he fought back tears, and supporters rubbed his
shoulders.

“But we’re still here, we’re strong,” he continued.
“Nobody gave us a chance, except the people who believed in us. People
called us animals — wolf pack.”The men, who were from 14 to 16 when the attack occurred,
were convicted based on confessions that they later said were coerced.
Mr. Richardson, Mr. Salaam, Mr. Santana and a fourth man, Antron McCray,
spent about seven years in prison. The fifth man, Kharey Wise, was
imprisoned for about 13 years.

In 2002, another man, Matias Reyes, confessed to the attack, and the five men’s convictions were vacated.

On Friday, Mr. Santana vowed to continue speaking out against wrongful convictions.

“All
I know how to do is go out there and speak about injustice and fight
for somebody else who’s been wrongfully convicted,” he said.

The
men stood with a crowd that included lawyers, family members, and former
City Councilman Charles Barron. Members of the crowd waved a large red,
black, and green flag, a flag created in the early 20th century to
symbolize the struggle for black liberation.

They thanked Mr. de
Blasio, who had promised during his mayoral campaign to settle the suit,
and criticized former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, whose administration
had fought it for years.

“Bloomberg and Raymond Kelly did
everything in their power to keep this case under wraps,” Michael W.
Warren, one of the lawyers for the men, said of the former mayor and the
former police commissioner.

Asked later why Mr. de Blasio was not at the news conference, another lawyer, Roger Wareham, said he had not been invited.

“We
asked the people to attend who had been supportive of this issue from
the beginning,” Mr. Wareham said. “But we acknowledged that at the press
conference that he is to be thanked for keeping his word.”

The
three men said that despite their settlement, they would continue to
work. Mr. Santana works for 1199 SEIU, the health care workers’ union,
dealing with pension and benefits funds. Mr. Richardson also works for
1199 SEIU but is taking the summer off to spend time with his family.
Mr. Salaam, a father of nine, works for a hospital as an information
technician.

The other two men did not attend the rally, Mr. Wareham said, because they were not available.

Several of the men’s family members dismissed the money as insignificant compared with their years of misery.

There may be a link between your Internet use and how often you end up in the emergency room.

At least that’s one of the curious connections to emerge from a health care analysis project at the insurance division of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

U.P.M.C. is a $12 billion nonprofit enterprise that owns hospitals in western Pennsylvania as well as a health insurance
plan with about 2.4 million members. It is at the forefront of an
emerging field called predictive health analytics, intended to improve
patients’ health care outcomes and contain costs. But patients
themselves are often unaware of the kinds of intimate details about
their households that insurers and hospitals may use to try to sway
their treatment decisions.

The Pittsburgh health plan, for
instance, has developed prediction models that analyze data like patient
claims, prescriptions and census records to determine which members are
likely to use the most emergency and urgent care, which can be
expensive. Data sets of past health care consumption are fairly standard
tools for predicting future use of health services.

But the
insurer recently bolstered its forecasting models with details on
members’ household incomes, education levels, marital status, race or
ethnicity, number of children at home, number of cars and so on. One of
the sources for the consumer data U.P.M.C. used was Acxiom, a marketing analytics company that obtains consumers’ information from both public records and private sources.

With
the addition of these household details, the insurer turned up a few
unexpected correlations: Mail-order shoppers and Internet users, for
example, were likelier than some other members to use more emergency
services.

Of course, buying furniture through, say, the Ikea
catalog is unlikely to send you to the emergency-room. But it could be a
proxy for other factors that do have a bearing on whether you seek
urgent care, says Pamela Peele, the chief analytics officer for the
U.P.M.C. insurance services division. A hypothetical patient might be a
catalog shopper, for instance, because he or she is homebound or doesn’t
have access to transportation.

“It brings me another layer of
vision, of view, that helps me figure out better prediction models and
allocate our clinical resources,” Dr. Peele said during a recent
interview. She added: “If you are going to decrease the costs and
improve the quality of care, you have to do something different.”

The
U.P.M.C. health plan has not yet acted on the correlations it found in
the household data. But it already segments its members into different
“market baskets,” based on analysis of more traditional data sets. Then
it assigns care coordinators to certain members flagged as high risk
because they have chronic conditions that aren’t being properly treated.
The goal, Dr. Peele said, is for the insurer to steer those patients to
primary care physicians or specialists who can provide care that is
more coordinated, more consistent and less costly than sporadic
emergency-room visits. The system might pinpoint, for example, high-risk
asthma
patients who have not yet been prescribed inhalers — and try to manage
their care before they end up in emergency rooms with asthma attacks.

The
very idea of using consumer data-mining and marketing segmentation on
patients troubles some technology and health law experts. Their concern
is that such practices could ultimately result in the inequitable
provision of medical care.

“This intensive, intrusive kind of
data analytics that leads to differential treatment of customers, even
if we are fine with it in the business context, needs to be disclosed in
the medical context,” says Frank Pasquale, a professor in health care regulation at the Seton Hall University School of Law.

Analyzing
details about household attributes and habits of individual consumers
is a longstanding practice in retailing, travel and finance. Credit card
marketers, for instance, may analyze consumers’ buying patterns and
financial wherewithal to decide whether to pitch them elite-level
special-privilege cards.

Now two factors are converging to speed the adoption of these techniques in medicine.

We
live in a sharing society. While older generations may still prefer to
keep their health status separate from their shopping and social
circles, digital natives are now publicly swapping minutiae about their
medical conditions on patient sites and social networks. And
fitness-tracking devices that personalize messages for users, based on
their workouts and sleep routines, are proliferating.

Second, the
new health care law encourages hospitals and medical groups to contain
costs for certain patient populations. To do that, providers are turning
to more sophisticated analytics.

In the vanguard are insurers like U.P.M.C., along with specialized marketing companies. Predilytics, a health care analytics company
in Burlington, Mass., taps into socioeconomic, demographic and consumer
purchasing data for health insurers seeking to identify those
highest-risk members who could benefit most from medical intervention.

After
an East Coast insurer asked for an analysis of hospitalization trends
among its members, Predilytics discovered that patients who couldn’t get
timely appointments with their primary care doctors or who lacked
transportation were more likely to end up in the hospital. That kind of
finding explains why analytics companies may include household car
ownership and other consumer data in their health care prediction
models.

“What we are really doing is looking at multifactorial
data and systemic issues that are getting in between individuals and
their ability to maintain the highest health status,” explains Chris Coloian, the president of Predilytics.

Some
specialized health care marketing companies are tapping into specifics
on individual consumers to help hospitals identify their most profitable
patients and encourage them to seek more medical care.

MedSeek, a software and analytics company
in Birmingham, Ala., offers services intended to help hospitals
“virtually influence” the behavior of current and would-be patients.
According to MedSeek.com, the company
offers a “21st-century tool kit” that can refine health care marketing
pitches based on sex, age, race, income, risk assessment, culture,
religious beliefs and family status. One client, Trinity Health System
in Michigan, used MedSeek’s services “to scientifically identify
well-insured prospects,” among others, and encourage them to schedule
screening tests and doctor visits, a company case study said.

In a blog post this month, Bill Andrae,
MedSeek’s vice president for client strategy, described other
techniques for influencing well-insured patients. Hospitals could send
birthday messages “to all high-value men and women,” he wrote, or notify
“profitable individuals 18 and above” about special round-the-clock
health care call-in lines staffed by nurses, and encourage those
revenue-generating patients to schedule medical tests or appointments.

After I sent questions by email, MedSeek removed the blog post. The company did not respond to the questions themselves.

Hospitals
have long tried to appeal to moneyed patients by offering them
specially furnished floors or private rooms. But specifically targeting
profitable patients and trying to channel them into moneymaking medical
procedures is different, health experts say, because it could be
problematic for them — and perhaps more so for so-called low-value
patients.

The pitches might encourage the worried well to have unnecessary screening tests,
for instance, potentially putting them at risk for false alarms and
unneeded biopsies. And by devoting so much attention to pulling in
low-risk or well-insured patients, health providers could end up
overlooking — or not having timely appointments available for — ailing,
poorly insured patients.

“Is the larger mission to improve public health, or to make insurers and hospitals more profitable?” asks Anita L. Allen,
a privacy law expert and the vice provost for faculty at the University
of Pennsylvania. “I think we should be careful of running gung-ho into
an area of health care analytics that may disadvantage deserving
patients.”

In a more-data-the-merrier culture, patients may
ultimately be unable to choose whether their health insurers know they
prefer organic foods, hunt big game or own a dog. If health insurers
mistakenly peg certain people as dog owners, patients probably won’t
find that out, either. (Acxiom,
one of the sources for the household information U.P.M.C. used in its
prediction models, has publicly acknowledged that its details about
consumers can be out of date or just plain wrong.)

Perhaps health
insurers and hospitals that use consumer data to steer patients into
different treatment tracks should be required to make public their
predictive findings and prove that they are plausible and equitable,
suggests Professor Pasquale at Seton Hall.

“It would be great if these programs do work,” he says. “But they are kind of untested right now.”

A year ago, buying foreclosed homes to rent out was the sure-thing trade for investment firms backed by money from private equity
companies, hedge funds and pension systems. But with the supply of
cheap foreclosed homes dwindling, some early investors are looking to
cash out a bit by flipping homes to competitors.

The Waypoint
Real Estate Group, one of the first companies to raise money from
private investors to buy foreclosed homes, is quietly shopping as many
as 2,000 houses in California that it acquired in the last few years in
several private investment funds, said three people who had been briefed
on the matter but were not authorized to discuss it. The homes, which
are largely rented, are being shown to other companies backed by
investor money that have also scooped up distressed houses in states
including Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois and Nevada.

Waypoint
is considering selling about half of its 4,000 homes. Some of the
biggest institutional investors in the market for foreclosed homes —
companies like the Blackstone Group, American Homes 4 Rent
and American Residential Properties — have slowed their pace of
acquisitions in response to an increase in home prices and a dearth of
foreclosed homes that do not require significant renovation.

Waypoint is following other early investors like the Och-Ziff Capital Management Group and Oaktree Capital
Management, which have sold homes bought near the start of the
financial crisis. But unlike Och-Ziff and Oaktree, Waypoint is not
leaving the single-family home market. It is still managing more than
7,000 homes for a publicly traded real estate investment trust, or REIT,
it formed last year with the Starwood Capital Group called Starwood Waypoint Residential Trust.

Jason
Chudoba, a spokesman for the trust and Waypoint’s management company,
said the firm did not comment on market speculation.

The
single-family home market, after a wave of acquisitions by companies
backed by Wall Street money, is changing as institutional buyers now
focus more on expanding their operations to manage tens of thousands of
homes across the United States. Industry participants say that the rapid
buying of foreclosed homes has ended and that they expect other early
institutional buyers to sell homes to lock in profits. They say they
also expect the business to consolidate into the hands of a few large
companies.

“Consolidation is a natural thing as inventory goes
down,” said Aaron Edelheit, a former hedge fund manager and chief
executive of a smaller company in Atlanta, the American Home, which
manages more than 2,500 rental homes in several Southeastern cities.

Over
all, institutional buyers have bought over 386,000 single-family homes
across the country since 2011, according to RealtyTrac, a property
research company.

That institutional buying has had a
significant effect, especially in cities like Phoenix, Las Vegas,
Atlanta and parts of Southern California, where housing prices plunged
the most during the financial crisis. The institutional investment in
those places helped fuel double-digit recoveries in home prices in the
last year and brought some stability to local housing markets, though
critics contend that institutional buyers have crowded out first-time
buyers.

But the rapid pace of acquisitions could not continue.
Even Blackstone, the largest acquirer of homes, which spent $8.6 billion
for 45,000 units in 14 cities, has reduced its once-feverish buying. It
now spends about $30 million a week to buy homes, said a person briefed
on its plans, compared with $140 million a week last summer. The $30
million that Blackstone spends buys about 116 homes.

Now,
institutional buyers like Blackstone are more focused on fixing the
properties they already own, renting them out and using the properties
as collateral to back bonds that can be sold to investors.

Blackstone,
American Homes 4 Rent and Colony American Homes have brought five
rent-backed securitization deals worth $3 billion to market. The bonds
in those deals are backed by loans issued on 20,741 rental homes owned
and operated by the three companies, according to Morningstar’s credit rating divisions, which has reviewed and rated the deals.

The
companies are finding that the most challenging part of the rental
business is expanding their property management operations — often from
scratch — to deal with leaky toilets, damaged roofs and tenants who do
not pay rent on time. Blackstone’s property management business,
Invitation Homes, for instance, has grown to more than 1,500 employees
from just 14 two years ago. The rapid growth has not always been easy.

“Most
of these companies have 18-month track records as property managers, so
they are still working out the operational details,” said Michael
Gutierrez, managing director of operational risk assessments at
Morningstar Credit Ratings. “There have been growing pains.”

Mr.
Gutierrez is responsible for reviewing the ability of a company that is
issuing securities backed by single-family homes to manage the
properties it has acquired. He says his team assesses oversight of the
contractors the company hires to renovate and repair homes, the speed
with which it responds to tenant complaints and the training employees
receive about dealing with renters and their adherence to fair
debt-collection practices.

Morningstar’s presale rating reports
on the bonds offered by Blackstone, Colony American and American Homes 4
Rent have deemed the work of the companies’ property managers
acceptable. But the reports note that all the companies are young with
limited operating records.

As for the Waypoint homes being
offered to rival companies, most of them are in Northern California or
the so-called Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. The homes are held in
10 investment funds that Waypoint began raising money for in 2009 from
investors as varied as Columbia University
and the private equity firm GI Partners. The three people briefed on
the matter said Waypoint appeared to be in no rush to sell the homes and
might opt to sell them piecemeal.

When Waypoint’s management group joined with Starwood
Property to oversee the operation of the new REIT, there was an
understanding that the investment company would look to gradually unwind
its private real estate funds, said one the people briefed on the
matter. In fact, in March, one of those original Waypoint investment
funds sold a portfolio of 707 homes for $144 million to the Starwood
Waypoint REIT.

This year we have more reason to celebrate the SF Pride 2014 parade in SanFrancisco: Heroic WikiLeaks whistle-blower Chelsea Manning is being honoredas an official Grand Marshal! March with us to show your pride in Chelsea!

Organized by the Chelsea Manning Support Network and Courage to Resist.Endorsing organizations include War Resisters League-West, CODEPINK Womenfor Peace, CivSol, and the Brass Liberation Orchestra.

Please contact us to include your organization as an endorser!

A motorized cable car will be available for participants with mobilitylimitations.

For further details, please contact farah@couragetoresist.org*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*---------*

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C.
SPECIAL APPEALS AND

ONGOING
CAMPAIGNS

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Transport Workers Protest Oakland Schools Censorship of Mumia

Fresh
from defeating Obama’s nominee to head the Civil Rights Division of the
Justice Department because he served for a period as Mumia’s attorney,
the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) is attacking an Oakland teacher’s
lesson plan that asks students to compare the censorship of Martin
Luther King’s later, thoroughly radical positions with the censorship of
Mumia Abu-Jamal’s prison writings. As a result of this intimidation
from the FOP, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) took down an
entire web site—Urban Dreams—which contained this as well as educational
material on a diverse range of issues!

The following is an open
letter by the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee protesting this
outrageous act of police-state censorship . . .

Stop the Censorship!Restore the Urban Dreams web site!

Open letter to Oakland School Board members:May 28, 2014

Members
of the Transport Workers Solidarity Committee, including (among others)
the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), BART workers
and AC Transit bus drivers, were appalled to hear that the Oakland
Unified School District succumbed to pressure from the Fraternal Order
of Police (FOP) and the right-wing Fox News by shutting down the
educational Urban Dreams website, which includes material on Mumia
Abu-Jamal and Martin Luther King Jr.

In effect, academic freedom
was pushed to a back seat of the bus. This censorship is wrong. The
Urban Dreams website must be restored immediately for all to freely
visit and learn.

If not, OUSD administration has joined in with
the FOP’s vendetta against Mumia Abu-Jamal. The target of the FOP-Fox
News smears was a lesson plan by Oakland teacher Craig Gordon asking
students to compare the media’s wall of silence on Martin Luther King’s
militant anti-corporate, anti-war campaigning with its wall of silence
on Mumia’s writings.

To take that lesson plan down, OUSD took
down the entire Urban Dreams website, a website containing many rich and
evocative teacher-developed lessons, of which Gordon’s is one. Several
of these lesson plans were still in active use by teachers in Oakland
and elsewhere. [Urban Dreams was initially set up under a grant from the
federal Dept. of Education in 1999-2004].

Academic freedom was pushed to the back of the bus. This censorship is wrong!

Mumia
Abu-Jamal, a Black journalist called the “voice of the voiceless,” was
framed for the murder of a Philadelphia policeman over 30 years ago and
sentenced to death. Only recently was this innocent man removed from
death row.

Fifteen years ago, in the best tradition of the
abolitionists, Oakland teachers initiated a teach-in on the plight of
Mumia Abu-Jamal and the vestige of slavery, the death penalty. Indeed,
Craig Gordon was one of the organizers of that teach-in.

Following
that stellar example in 1999, striking school teachers in Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil, demanded his release from prison. As well, longshore
workers shutdown all West Coast ports and led a march of 25,000 strong
in San Francisco calling for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Workers
in the Bay Area, especially here in Oakland, have a long and proud
tradition of defending Black victims of the racist state oppression –
from Martin Luther King Jr. to Angela Davis to Huey Newton to Oscar
Grant.

Oakland teachers have an obligation to teach that history and students have a right to learn from that history!

The Urban Dreams website must be restored immediatelyfor all to freely visit and learn!

Because
of a determined people’s movement, Lynne is finally home with her
family. But she has urgent medical needs and costs. Lynne’s Stage 4
breast cancer spread a year ago to both lungs, back, bones and lymph
nodes. Now 74, she has lost weight and has trouble breathing; doctors
estimate her lifespan at 12 months. Lynne will soon begin treatment
requiring her to pay deductibles and co-payments. To boost the odds,
she’ll use a special diet, vitamins, and other healing methods – some
costly and none covered by insurance.
Lynne’s spirit is indomitable – help her fight to survive!

Tell Maj. Gen. Buchanan why Chelsea deserves to be free!

PVT Chelsea Manning has served nearly four years in prison, yet she’s
showing a remarkable spirit of persistence. She is unjustly imprisoned,
but not defeated. With plans to enroll in a prelaw/political science
university program, and a legal name change underway, she continues
planning for her future and working to fulfill her dreams. She is
determined to make the best of her situation. However, we know she could
contribute more to the world if she was free.Please write a letter to Convening Authority Major General Buchanan today urging him to reduce Chelsea’s sentence!
We began collecting letters to include in PVT Manning’s clemency
packet last fall. We expected that the military would finalize her
record of trial last December, and that she could then submit her
application to Maj. Gen. Buchanan by the end of 2013. Just like so many
times before, however, the military’s process has slowed Chelsea’s
ability to defend her rights. Defense attorney David Coombs now
estimates that it will be at least another month before the clemency
application can be submitted.
Want to make sure decision-makers know why you believe Chelsea
deserves to go free? If you haven’t done so yet, please write a short
letter to Maj. Gen. Buchanan. Hundreds of people have already submitted
letters for us to use, including Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel
Ellsberg and award-winning author Alice Walker.
As Alice Walker wrote:

Private Manning was the one soldier willing to speak out
against what he thought was wrong. When others silently followed orders,
Manning could not. Pvt. Manning is a humanist, meaning he sees humanity
before nationality, and values human life above all else. When he
released documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, he wanted the American people,
and the world, to judge for themselves if the U.S. military was properly
valuing human life in Iraq and Afghanistan. As taxpayers who fund that
military, we deserve that opportunity.

On
January 29, 2014 Lorenzo Johnson’s attorney, Michael Wiseman, met with
representatives of PA Attorney General Kathleen Kane to discuss the new
evidence of Lorenzo Johnson’s innocence contained in legal filings now
pending in the Pennsylvania courts. This includes affidavits confirming
Johnson’s presence in New York City at the time of the Harrisburg murder
and the identity of the actual killers, as well as police and
prosecutorial misconduct.

Attorney Wiseman said Kane’s office
promised to investigate these new facts in order to assess whether they
merit the relief that Lorenzo Johnson seeks in his PCRA petition.

Speaking
to AP reporter Mary Claire Dale on February 11, 2014 Wiseman said, “We
believe the witnesses we presented to them are credible, and give a
coherent version of the events. I take them at their word, that they’re
going to do a straightforward, honest review.” Kane spokesman Joe
Peters confirmed the meeting to AP “but said the office won’t comment on
the new evidence until the court filing,” (referring to the March 31,
2014 date for the AG’s response to Johnson’s October 2013 court filing).

It
is the Office of the PA Attorney General that is responsible for the
false prosecution of Lorenzo Johnson from trial through appeals. And
just a few months ago, the Attorney General’s office opposed a federal
petition based on this new evidence saying there was no prima facie
claim for relief. This resulted in the denial of Lorenzo Johnson’s
Motion to File a Second Writ of Habeas Corpus in the federal court.

On
December 18, 2013 a press conference called by the Campaign to Free
Lorenzo Johnson protested these actions of the PA Attorney General and
delivered petitions demanding dismissal of the charges and immediate
freedom for Lorenzo. Tazza, Lorenzo’s wife, declared, “1,000 signatures
means we are not in this alone…I won't stop until he’s home. There is
nothing and no one that can stop me from fighting for what’s right.”

This
is Lorenzo Johnson’s second fight for his innocence and freedom. In
January 2012, after 16 years of court battles to prove his innocence, a
federal appeals court held his sentence was based on insufficient
evidence – a judicial acquittal. Lorenzo was freed from prison. But
after a petition filed by the PA Attorney General the U.S. Supreme Court
reinstated Lorenzo Johnson’s conviction and he was re-incarcerated to
continue serving a life sentence without parole for a murder he did not
commit.

This innocent man drove himself back to prison in June
2012—after less than five months of freedom—leaving his new wife and
family, construction job and advocacy on behalf of others wrongfully
convicted. The reason Lorenzo Johnson voluntarily returned to prison?
Because he is innocent and fighting for full vindication.

In the
words of Lorenzo Johnson, “A second is too long to be in prison when
you are Innocent, so eighteen years … is Intolerable.”

Today
we issue an international call for Spring Days of Action—2014, a
coordinated campaign in April and May to end drone killings, drone
surveillance and global militarization.

The campaign will focus on drone bases, drone research facilities and test sites and drone manufacturers.

The campaign will provide information on:

1.
The suffering of tens-of-thousands of people in Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Yemen, Somalia and Gaza who are under drone attack, documenting the
killing, the wounding and the devastating impact of constant drone
surveillance on community life.

2. How attack and surveillance
drones have become a key element in a massive wave of surveillance,
clandestine military attacks and militarization generated by the United
States to protect a global system of manufacture and oil and mineral
exploitation that is creating unemployment and poverty, accelerating the
waste of nonrenewable resources and contributing to environmental
destruction and global warming.

In addition to cases in the
Middle East, Africa and Central Asia, we will examine President Obama’s
“pivot” into the Asia-Pacific, where the United States has already sold
and deployed drones in the vanguard of a shift of 60 percent of its
military forces to try to control China and to enforce the planned
Trans-Pacific Partnership. We will show, among other things, how this
surge of “pivot” forces, greatly enabled by drones, and supported by the
U.S. military-industrial complex, will hit every American community
with even deeper cuts in the already fragile social programs on which
people rely for survival. In short, we will connect drones and
militarization with “austerity” in America.

3. How drone attacks
have effectively destroyed international and domestic legal protection
of the rights to life, privacy, freedom of assembly and free speech and
have opened the way for new levels of surveillance and repression around
the world, and how, in the United States, increasing drone
surveillance, added to surveillance by the National Security Agency and
police, provides a new weapon to repress black, Hispanic, immigrant and
low-income communities and to intimidate Americans who are increasingly
unsettled by lack of jobs, economic inequality, corporate control of
politics and the prospect of endless war.

We will discuss how
the United States government and corporations conspire secretly to
monitor U.S. citizens and particularly how the Administration is
accelerating drone surveillance operations and surveillance inside the
United States with the same disregard for transparency and law that it
applies to other countries, all with the cooperation of the Congress.

The campaign will encourage activists around the world to win passage
of local laws that prohibit weaponized drones and drone surveillance
from being used in their communities as well as seeking national laws to
bar the use of weaponized drones and drone surveillance.

The campaign will draw attention to the call for a ban on weaponized drones by RootsAction.org that has generated a petition with over 80,000 signers:

Sireen
Khudairy was arrested again at 4am on Tuesday 7th January 2014. According to
reports she has been taken to Huwwara military point. When the Israeli army
took her from her home they didn't show any papers to her or the person she was
with.

This
follows eight months of harassment of this 24-year-old Palestinian woman who is
a teacher, activist and supporter of the non-violent action against the Israeli
occupation. She was previously imprisoned from May to July 2013, and has been
subjected to frequent harassment ever since. See further details at:

http://freesireen.wordpress.com

Please
help by contacting your Embassies urgently to demand her release and spread her
appeal widely. Follow updates on:

https://www.facebook.com/FreeSireenKhudiri?ref=hl

Please
contact us to let us know any action you take. We will pass this information on
to her family. Thanks for your solidarity and support.

Steven Katsineris, January 2014

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U.S.
Court of Appeals Rules Against Lorenzo Johnson’s
New Legal Challenge to His Frame-up Conviction!
Demand the PA Attorney General Dismiss the Charges!
Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!

The
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied Lorenzo Johnson’s motion to
file a Second Habeas Corpus Petition. The order contained the outrageous
declaration that Johnson hadn’t made a “prima facie case” that he had new
evidence of his innocence. This not only puts a legal obstacle in Johnson’s
path as his fight for freedom makes its way (again) through the state and
federal courts—but it undermines the newly filed Pennsylvania state appeal that
is pending in the Court of Common Pleas.

Stripped
of “legalese,” the court’s October 15, 2013 order says Johnson’s new
evidence was not brought into court soon enough—although it was the prosecution
and police who withheld evidence and coerced witnesses into lying or not coming
forward with the truth! This, despite over fifteen years and rounds of legal
battles to uncover the evidence of government misconduct. This is a set-back
for Lorenzo Johnson’s renewed fight for his freedom, but Johnson is even more
determined as his PA state court appeal continues.

Increased
public support and protest is needed. The fight for Lorenzo Johnson’s freedom
is not only a fight for this courageous man and family. The fight for Lorenzo
Johnson is also a fight for all the innocent others who have been framed and
are sitting in the slow death of prison. The PA Attorney General is directly
pursuing the charges against Lorenzo, despite the evidence of his innocence and
the corruption of the police. Free Lorenzo Johnson, Now!

—Rachel
Wolkenstein, Esq.

October 25, 2013

For
more on the federal court and PA state court legal filings.

Hear
Mumia’s latest commentary, “Cat Cries”

Go
to: www.FreeLorenzoJohnson.org for more information, to sign the petition, and
how to help.

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PUSH
CHELSEA'S JAILERS TO RESPECT HER IDENTITY

Call
and write Ft Leavenworth today and tell them to honor Manning's wishes around
her name and gender:

Call:
(913) 758-3600

Write
to:

Col.
Sioban Ledwith, Commander

U.S.
Detention Barracks

1301
N Warehouse Rd

Ft.
Leavenworth KS 66027

Private
Manning has been an icon both for the government transparency movement and
LGBTQ activists because of her fearlessness and acts of conscience. Now, as she
begins serving her sentence, Chelsea has asked for help with legal appeals,
family visits, education, and support for undergoing gender transition. The
latter is a decision she’s made following years of experiencing gender
dysphoria and examining her options. At a difficult time in her life, she
joined the military out of hope–the hope that she could use her service to save
lives, and also the hope that it would help to suppress her feelings of gender
dysphoria. But after serving time in Iraq, Private Manning realized what
mattered to her most was the truth, personal as well as political, even when it
proved challenging.

Now
she wants the Fort Leavenworth military prison to allow her access to hormone
replacement therapy which she has offered to pay for herself, as she pursues
the process to have her name legally changed to ‘Chelsea Elizabeth Manning.’

To
encourage the prison to honor her transgender identity, we’re calling on
progressive supporters and allies to contact Fort Leavenworth officials
demanding they acknowledge her requested name change immediately. Currently,
prison officials are not required to respect Chelsea’s identity, and can even
refuse to deliver mail addressed to the name ‘Chelsea Manning.’ However, it’s
within prison administrators’ power to begin using the name ‘Chelsea Manning’
now, in advance of the legal name change which will most likely be approved
sometime next year. It’s also up to these officials to approve Private
Manning’s request for hormone therapy.

Call:
(913) 758-3600

Write
to:

Col.
Sioban Ledwith, Commander

U.S.
Detention Barracks

1301
N Warehouse Rd

Ft.
Leavenworth KS 66027

Tell
them: “Transgender rights are human rights! Respect Private Manning’s identity
by acknowledging the name ‘Chelsea Manning’ whenever possible, including in
mail addressed to her, and by allowing her access to appropriate medical
treatment for gender dysphoria, including hormone replacement therapy (HRT).”

While
openly transgender individuals are allowed to serve in many other militaries
around the world, the US military continues to deny their existence. Now, by
speaking up for Chelsea’s right to treatment, you can support one brave
whistleblower in her personal struggle, and help set an important benchmark for
the rights of transgender individuals everywhere. (Remember that letters
written with focus and a respectful tone are more likely to be effective.) Feel
free to copy this sample letter.

Earlier
this year, the Private Manning Support Network won the title of most
“absolutely fabulous overall contingent” at the San Francisco Pride Parade, the
largest celebration of its kind for LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay Bisexual, Transgender
and Questioning) people nationwide. Over one thousand people marched for
Private Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning in that parade, to show LGBTQ
community pride for the Iraq War’s most well-known whistleblower.

Help
us continue to cover 100%
of Pvt. Manning's legal fees! Donate today.

We
are working to ensure that the ACCJC’s authority is not renewed by the
Department of Education this December when they are up for their 5-year
renewal. Our campaign made it possible for over 50 Third Party Comments to be
sent to the DOE re: the ACCJC. Our next step in this campaign is to send a
delegation from CCSF to Washington, D.C. to give oral comments at the hearing
on December 12th. We expect to have an array of forces aligned on the other
side who have much more money and resources than we do.

So
please support this effort to get ACCJC authority revoked!

LEGAL
CAMPAIGN

Save
CCSF members have been meeting with Attorney Dan Siegel since last May to
explore legal avenues to fight the ACCJC. After much consideration, and
consultation with AFT 2121’s attorney as well as the SF City Attorney’s office,
Dan has come up with a legal strategy that is complimentary to what is already
being pursued. In fact, AFT 2121’s attorney is encouraging us to go forward.

The
total costs of pursuing this (depositions, etc.) will be substantially more
than $15,000. However, Dan is willing to do it for a fixed fee of $15,000. He
will not expect a retainer, i.e. payment in advance, but we should start
payments ASAP. If we win the ACCJC will have to pay our costs.

PLEASE
HELP BOTH OF THESE IMPORTANT EFFORTS!

Checks
can be made out to Save CCSF Coalition with “legal” in the memo line and sent
to:

16
Years in Solitary Confinement Is Like a "Living Tomb"

American
Civil Liberties Union petition to end long-term solitary confinement:

California
Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard: We stand with the prisoners on hunger
strike. We urge you to comply with the US Commission on Safety and Abuse in
America’s Prisons 2006 recommendations regarding an end to long-term solitary
confinement.

In
California, hundreds of prisoners have been held in solitary for more than a
decade – some for infractions as trivial as reading Machiavelli's "The
Prince."

Gabriel
Reyes describes the pain of being isolated for at least 22 hours a day for the
last 16 years:

“Unless
you have lived it, you cannot imagine what it feels like to be by yourself,
between four cold walls, with little concept of time…. It is a living tomb …’ I
have not been allowed physical contact with any of my loved ones since 1995…I
feel helpless and hopeless. In short, I am being psychologically tortured.”

That’s
why over 30,000 prisoners in California began a hunger strike – the biggest the
state has ever seen. They’re refusing food to protest prisoners being held for
decades in solitary and to push for other changes to improve their basic
conditions.

California
Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard has tried to dismiss the strikers and
refuses to negotiate, but the media pressure is building through the strike. If
tens of thousands of us take action, we can help keep this issue in the
spotlight so that Secretary Beard can’t ignore the inhumane treatment of
prisoners.

Sign
the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term
solitary confinement.

Solitary
is such an extreme form of punishment that a United Nations torture rapporteur
called for an international ban on the practice except in rare occasions.
Here’s why:

The
majority of the 80,000 people held in solitary in this country are severely
mentally ill or because of a minor infraction (it’s a myth that it’s only for
violent prisoners)

Even
for people with stable mental health, solitary causes severe psychological
reactions, often leading people to attempt suicide

It
jeopardizes public safety because prisoners held in solitary have a harder time
reintegrating into society.

And
to add insult to injury, the hunger strikers are now facing retaliation – their
lawyers are being restricted from visiting and the strikers are being punished.
But the media continues to write about the hunger strike and we can help keep
the pressure on Secretary Beard by signing this petition.

Sign
the petition urging Corrections Secretary Beard to end the use of long-term
solitary confinement.

Our
criminal justice system should keep communities safe and treat people fairly.
The use of solitary confinement undermines both of these goals – but little by
little, we can help put a stop to such cruelty.

Thank
you,

Anthony
for the ACLU Action team

P.S.
The hunger strikers have developed five core demands to address their basic
conditions, the main one being an end to long-term solitary confinement. They
are:

The
statement was read by Pfc. Bradley Manning at a providence inquiry for his
formal plea of guilty to one specification as charged and nine specifications
for lesser included offenses. He pled not guilty to 12 other specifications.
This rush transcript was taken by journalist Alexa O'Brien at Thursday's
pretrial hearing and first appeared on Salon.com.

You
Have the Right to Remain Silent: NLG Guide to Law Enforcement Encounters

Posted
1 day ago on July 27, 2012, 10:28 p.m. EST by OccupyWallSt

Occupy
Wall Street is a nonviolent movement for social and economic justice, but in
recent days disturbing reports have emerged of Occupy-affiliated activists
being targeted by US law enforcement, including agents from the FBI and
Department of Homeland Security. To help ensure Occupiers and allied activists
know their rights when encountering law enforcement, we are publishing in full
the National Lawyers Guild's booklet: You Have the Right to Remain Silent. The
NLG provides invaluable support to the Occupy movement and other activists –
please click here to support the NLG.

We
strongly encourage all Occupiers to read and share the information provided
below. We also recommend you enter the NLG's national hotline number
(888-654-3265) into your cellphone (if you have one) and keep a copy handy.
This information is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact the
NLG or a criminal defense attorney immediately if you have been visited by the
FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should also alert your relatives,
friends, co-workers and others so that they will be prepared if they are
contacted as well.

You
Have the Right to Remain Silent: A Know Your Rights Guide for Law Enforcement
Encounters

What
Rights Do I Have?

Whether
or not you're a citizen, you have rights under the United States Constitution.
The Fifth Amendment gives every person the right to remain silent: not to
answer questions asked by a police officer or government agent. The Fourth
Amendment restricts the government's power to enter and search your home or
workplace, although there are many exceptions and new laws have expanded the
government's power to conduct surveillance. The First Amendment protects your
right to speak freely and to advocate for social change. However, if you are a
non-citizen, the Department of Homeland Security may target you based on your
political activities.

Standing
Up For Free Speech

The
government's crusade against politically-active individuals is intended to
disrupt and suppress the exercise of time-honored free speech activities, such
as boycotts, protests, grassroots organizing and solidarity work. Remember that
you have the right to stand up to the intimidation tactics of FBI agents and
other law enforcement officials who, with political motives, are targeting
organizing and free speech activities. Informed resistance to these tactics and
steadfast defense of your and others' rights can bring positive results. Each
person who takes a courageous stand makes future resistance to government oppression
easier for all. The National Lawyers Guild has a long tradition of standing up
to government repression. The organization itself was labeled a
"subversive" group during the McCarthy Era and was subject to FBI
surveillance and infiltration for many years. Guild attorneys have defended
FBI-targeted members of the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement,
and the Puerto Rican independence movement. The NLG exposed FBI surveillance,
infiltration and disruption tactics that were detailed during the 1975-76
COINTELPRO hearings. In 1989 the NLG prevailed in a lawsuit on behalf of
several activist organizations, including the Guild, that forced the FBI to
expose the extent to which it had been spying on activist movements. Under the
settlement, the FBI turned over roughly 400,000 pages of its files on the
Guild, which are now available at the Tamiment Library at New York University.

What
if FBI Agents or Police Contact Me?

What
if an agent or police officer comes to the door?

Do
not invite the agents or police into your home. Do not answer any questions.
Tell the agent that you do not wish to talk with him or her. You can state that
your lawyer will contact them on your behalf. You can do this by stepping
outside and pulling the door behind you so that the interior of your home or
office is not visible, getting their contact information or business cards and
then returning inside. They should cease questioning after this. If the agent
or officer gives a reason for contacting you, take notes and give the
information to your attorney. Anything you say, no matter how seemingly
harmless or insignificant, may be used against you or others in the future.
Lying to or misleading a federal agent is a crime. The more you speak, the more
opportunity for federal law enforcement to find something you said (even if not
intentionally) false and assert that you lied to a federal officer.

Do
I have to answer questions?

You
have the constitutional right to remain silent. It is not a crime to refuse to
answer questions. You do not have to talk to anyone, even if you have been
arrested or are in jail. You should affirmatively and unambiguously state that
you wish to remain silent and that you wish to consult an attorney. Once you
make the request to speak to a lawyer, do not say anything else. The Supreme
Court recently ruled that answering law enforcement questions may be taken as a
waiver of your right to remain silent, so it is important that you assert your
rights and maintain them. Only a judge can order you to answer questions. There
is one exception: some states have "stop and identify" statutes which
require you to provide identity information or your name if you have been
detained on reasonable suspicion that you may have committed a crime. A lawyer
in your state can advise you of the status of these requirements where you
reside.

Do
I have to give my name?

As
above, in some states you can be detained or arrested for merely refusing to
give your name. And in any state, police do not always follow the law, and
refusing to give your name may make them suspicious or more hostile and lead to
your arrest, even without just cause, so use your judgment. Giving a false name
could in some circumstances be a crime.

Do
I need a lawyer?

You
have the right to talk to a lawyer before you decide whether to answer
questions from law enforcement. It is a good idea to talk to a lawyer if you
are considering answering any questions. You have the right to have a lawyer
present during any interview. The lawyer's job is to protect your rights. Once
you tell the agent that you want to talk to a lawyer, he or she should stop
trying to question you and should make any further contact through your lawyer.
If you do not have a lawyer, you can still tell the officer you want to speak to
one before answering questions. Remember to get the name, agency and telephone
number of any investigator who visits you, and give that information to your
lawyer. The government does not have to provide you with a free lawyer unless
you are charged with a crime, but the NLG or another organization may be able
to help you find a lawyer for free or at a reduced rate.

If
I refuse to answer questions or say I want a lawyer, won't it seem like I have
something to hide?

Anything
you say to law enforcement can be used against you and others. You can never
tell how a seemingly harmless bit of information might be used or manipulated
to hurt you or someone else. That is why the right not to talk is a fundamental
right under the Constitution. Keep in mind that although law enforcement agents
are allowed to lie to you, lying to a government agent is a crime. Remaining
silent is not. The safest things to say are "I am going to remain
silent," "I want to speak to my lawyer," and "I do not consent
to a search." It is a common practice for law enforcement agents to try to
get you to waive your rights by telling you that if you have nothing to hide
you would talk or that talking would "just clear things up." The fact
is, if they are questioning you, they are looking to incriminate you or someone
you may know, or they are engaged in political intelligence gathering. You
should feel comfortable standing firm in protection and defense of your rights
and refusing to answer questions.

Can
agents search my home or office?

You
do not have to let police or agents into your home or office unless they have
and produce a valid search warrant. A search warrant is a written court order
that allows the police to conduct a specified search. Interfering with a
warrantless search probably will not stop it and you might get arrested. But
you should say "I do not consent to a search," and call a criminal
defense lawyer or the NLG. You should be aware that a roommate or guest can
legally consent to a search of your house if the police believe that person has
the authority to give consent, and your employer can consent to a search of
your workspace without your permission.

What
if agents have a search warrant?

If
you are present when agents come for the search, you can ask to see the
warrant. The warrant must specify in detail the places to be searched and the
people or things to be taken away. Tell the agents you do not consent to the
search so that they cannot go beyond what the warrant authorizes. Ask if you
are allowed to watch the search; if you are allowed to, you should. Take notes,
including names, badge numbers, what agency each officer is from, where they
searched and what they took. If others are present, have them act as witnesses
to watch carefully what is happening. If the agents ask you to give them
documents, your computer, or anything else, look to see if the item is listed
in the warrant. If it is not, do not consent to them taking it without talking
to a lawyer. You do not have to answer questions. Talk to a lawyer first.
(Note: If agents present an arrest warrant, they may only perform a cursory
visual search of the premises to see if the person named in the arrest warrant
is present.)

Do
I have to answer questions if I have been arrested?

No.
If you are arrested, you do not have to answer any questions. You should
affirmatively and unambiguously state that you wish to assert your right to
remain silent. Ask for a lawyer right away. Do not say anything else. Repeat to
every officer who tries to talk to or question you that you wish to remain
silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer. You should always talk to a
lawyer before you decide to answer any questions.

What
if I speak to government agents anyway?

Even
if you have already answered some questions, you can refuse to answer other
questions until you have a lawyer. If you find yourself talking, stop. Assert
that you wish to remain silent and that you wish to speak to a lawyer.

What
if the police stop me on the street?

Ask
if you are free to go. If the answer is yes, consider just walking away. If the
police say you are not under arrest, but are not free to go, then you are being
detained. The police can pat down the outside of your clothing if they have
reason to suspect you might be armed and dangerous. If they search any more
than this, say clearly, "I do not consent to a search." They may keep
searching anyway. If this happens, do not resist because you can be charged
with assault or resisting arrest. You do not have to answer any questions. You
do not have to open bags or any closed container. Tell the officers you do not
consent to a search of your bags or other property.

What
if police or agents stop me in my car?

Keep
your hands where the police can see them. If you are driving a vehicle, you
must show your license, registration and, in some states, proof of insurance.
You do not have to consent to a search. But the police may have legal grounds
to search your car anyway. Clearly state that you do not consent. Officers may
separate passengers and drivers from each other to question them, but no one
has to answer any questions.

What
if I am treated badly by the police or the FBI?

Write
down the officer's badge number, name or other identifying information. You
have a right to ask the officer for this information. Try to find witnesses and
their names and phone numbers. If you are injured, seek medical attention and
take pictures of the injuries as soon as you can. Call a lawyer as soon as
possible.

What
if the police or FBI threaten me with a grand jury subpoena if I don't answer
their questions?

A
grand jury subpoena is a written order for you to go to court and testify about
information you may have. It is common for the FBI to threaten you with a
subpoena to get you to talk to them. If they are going to subpoena you, they
will do so anyway. You should not volunteer to speak just because you are
threatened with a subpoena. You should consult a lawyer.

What
if I receive a grand jury subpoena?

Grand
jury proceedings are not the same as testifying at an open court trial. You are
not allowed to have a lawyer present (although one may wait in the hallway and
you may ask to consult with him or her after each question) and you may be asked
to answer questions about your activities and associations. Because of the
witness's limited rights in this situation, the government has frequently used
grand jury subpoenas to gather information about activists and political
organizations. It is common for the FBI to threaten activists with a subpoena
in order to elicit information about their political views and activities and
those of their associates. There are legal grounds for stopping
("quashing") subpoenas, and receiving one does not necessarily mean
that you are suspected of a crime. If you do receive a subpoena, call the NLG
National Hotline at 888-NLG-ECOL (888-654-3265) or call a criminal defense
attorney immediately.

The
government regularly uses grand jury subpoena power to investigate and seek
evidence related to politically-active individuals and social movements. This
practice is aimed at prosecuting activists and, through intimidation and
disruption, discouraging continued activism.

Federal
grand jury subpoenas are served in person. If you receive one, it is critically
important that you retain the services of an attorney, preferably one who
understands your goals and, if applicable, understands the nature of your
political work, and has experience with these issues. Most lawyers are trained
to provide the best legal defense for their client, often at the expense of
others. Beware lawyers who summarily advise you to cooperate with grand juries,
testify against friends, or cut off contact with your friends and political
activists. Cooperation usually leads to others being subpoenaed and
investigated. You also run the risk of being charged with perjury, a felony,
should you omit any pertinent information or should there be inconsistencies in
your testimony.

Frequently
prosecutors will offer "use immunity," meaning that the prosecutor is
prohibited from using your testimony or any leads from it to bring charges
against you. If a subsequent prosecution is brought, the prosecutor bears the
burden of proving that all of its evidence was obtained independent of the
immunized testimony. You should be aware, however, that they will use anything
you say to manipulate associates into sharing more information about you by
suggesting that you have betrayed confidences.

In
front of a grand jury you can "take the Fifth" (exercise your right
to remain silent). However, the prosecutor may impose immunity on you, which
strips you of Fifth Amendment protection and subjects you to the possibility of
being cited for contempt and jailed if you refuse to answer further. In front
of a grand jury you have no Sixth Amendment right to counsel, although you can
consult with a lawyer outside the grand jury room after each question.

What
if I don't cooperate with the grand jury?

If
you receive a grand jury subpoena and elect to not cooperate, you may be held
in civil contempt. There is a chance that you may be jailed or imprisoned for
the length of the grand jury in an effort to coerce you to cooperate. Regular
grand juries sit for a basic term of 18 months, which can be extended up to a
total of 24 months. It is lawful to hold you in order to coerce your
cooperation, but unlawful to hold you as a means of punishment. In rare
instances you may face criminal contempt charges.

What
If I Am Not a Citizen and the DHS Contacts Me?

The
Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) is now part of the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) and has been renamed and reorganized into: 1. The
Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS); 2. The Bureau of Customs
and Border Protection (CBP); and 3. The Bureau of Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE). All three bureaus will be referred to as DHS for the
purposes of this pamphlet.

?
Assert your rights. If you do not demand your rights or if you sign papers
waiving your rights, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may deport you
before you see a lawyer or an immigration judge. Never sign anything without
reading, understanding and knowing the consequences of signing it.

?
Talk to a lawyer. If possible, carry with you the name and telephone number of
an immigration lawyer who will take your calls. The immigration laws are hard
to understand and there have been many recent changes. DHS will not explain
your options to you. As soon as you encounter a DHS agent, call your attorney.
If you can't do it right away, keep trying. Always talk to an immigration
lawyer before leaving the U.S. Even some legal permanent residents can be
barred from returning.

Based
on today's laws, regulations and DHS guidelines, non-citizens usually have the
following rights, no matter what their immigration status. This information may
change, so it is important to contact a lawyer. The following rights apply to
non-citizens who are inside the U.S. Non-citizens at the border who are trying
to enter the U.S. do not have all the same rights.

Do
I have the right to talk to a lawyer before answering any DHS questions or
signing any DHS papers?

Yes.
You have the right to call a lawyer or your family if you are detained, and you
have the right to be visited by a lawyer in detention. You have the right to
have your attorney with you at any hearing before an immigration judge. You do
not have the right to a government-appointed attorney for immigration
proceedings, but if you have been arrested, immigration officials must show you
a list of free or low cost legal service providers.

Should
I carry my green card or other immigration papers with me?

If
you have documents authorizing you to stay in the U.S., you must carry them
with you. Presenting false or expired papers to DHS may lead to deportation or
criminal prosecution. An unexpired green card, I-94, Employment Authorization
Card, Border Crossing Card or other papers that prove you are in legal status
will satisfy this requirement. If you do not carry these papers with you, you
could be charged with a crime. Always keep a copy of your immigration papers
with a trusted family member or friend who can fax them to you, if need be.
Check with your immigration lawyer about your specific case.

Am
I required to talk to government officers about my immigration history?

If
you are undocumented, out of status, a legal permanent resident (green card
holder), or a citizen, you do not have to answer any questions about your
immigration history. (You may want to consider giving your name; see above for
more information about this.) If you are not in any of these categories, and
you are being questioned by a DHS or FBI agent, then you may create problems
with your immigration status if you refuse to provide information requested by
the agent. If you have a lawyer, you can tell the agent that your lawyer will
answer questions on your behalf. If answering questions could lead the agent to
information that connects you with criminal activity, you should consider
refusing to talk to the agent at all.

If
I am arrested for immigration violations, do I have the right to a hearing
before an immigration judge to defend myself against deportation charges?

Yes.
In most cases only an immigration judge can order you deported. But if you
waive your rights or take "voluntary departure," agreeing to leave
the country, you could be deported without a hearing. If you have criminal
convictions, were arrested at the border, came to the U.S. through the visa
waiver program or have been ordered deported in the past, you could be deported
without a hearing. Contact a lawyer immediately to see if there is any relief
for you.

Can
I call my consulate if I am arrested?

Yes.
Non-citizens arrested in the U.S. have the right to call their consulate or to
have the police tell the consulate of your arrest. The police must let your
consulate visit or speak with you if consular officials decide to do so. Your
consulate might help you find a lawyer or offer other help. You also have the
right to refuse help from your consulate.

What
happens if I give up my right to a hearing or leave the U.S. before the hearing
is over?

You
could lose your eligibility for certain immigration benefits, and you could be
barred from returning to the U.S. for a number of years. You should always talk
to an immigration lawyer before you decide to give up your right to a hearing.

What
should I do if I want to contact DHS?

Always
talk to a lawyer before contacting DHS, even on the phone. Many DHS officers
view "enforcement" as their primary job and will not explain all of
your options to you.

What
Are My Rights at Airports?

IMPORTANT
NOTE: It is illegal for law enforcement to perform any stops, searches,
detentions or removals based solely on your race, national origin, religion,
sex or ethnicity.

If
I am entering the U.S. with valid travel papers can a U.S. customs agent stop
and search me?

Yes.
Customs agents have the right to stop, detain and search every person and item.

Can
my bags or I be searched after going through metal detectors with no problem or
after security sees that my bags do not contain a weapon?

Yes.
Even if the initial screen of your bags reveals nothing suspicious, the
screeners have the authority to conduct a further search of you or your bags.

If
I am on an airplane, can an airline employee interrogate me or ask me to get
off the plane?

The
pilot of an airplane has the right to refuse to fly a passenger if he or she
believes the passenger is a threat to the safety of the flight. The pilot's decision
must be reasonable and based on observations of you, not stereotypes.

What
If I Am Under 18?

Do
I have to answer questions?

No.
Minors too have the right to remain silent. You cannot be arrested for refusing
to talk to the police, probation officers, or school officials, except in some
states you may have to give your name if you have been detained.

What
if I am detained?

If
you are detained at a community detention facility or Juvenile Hall, you
normally must be released to a parent or guardian. If charges are filed against
you, in most states you are entitled to counsel (just like an adult) at no
cost.

Do
I have the right to express political views at school?

Public
school students generally have a First Amendment right to politically organize
at school by passing out leaflets, holding meetings, etc., as long as those
activities are not disruptive and do not violate legitimate school rules. You
may not be singled out based on your politics, ethnicity or religion.

Can
my backpack or locker be searched?

School
officials can search students' backpacks and lockers without a warrant if they
reasonably suspect that you are involved in criminal activity or carrying drugs
or weapons. Do not consent to the police or school officials searching your property,
but do not physically resist or you may face criminal charges.

Disclaimer

This
booklet is not a substitute for legal advice. You should contact an attorney if
you have been visited by the FBI or other law enforcement officials. You should
also alert your relatives, friends, co-workers and others so that they will be
prepared if they are contacted as well.

The
following link is to a short video which provides an overview of Al-Awda's

work
since the founding of our organization in 2000. This video was first shown

on
Saturday May 23, 2009 at the fundraising banquet of the 7th Annual Int'l

Al-Awda
Convention in Anaheim California. It was produced from footage collected

over
the past nine years.

Video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTiAkbB5uC0&eurl

Support
Al-Awda, a Great Organization and Cause!

Al-Awda,
The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, depends on your financial

support
to carry out its work.

To
submit your tax-deductible donation to support our work, go to

http://www.al-awda.org/donate.html

and
follow the simple instructions.

Thank
you for your generosity!

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D.
VIDEO, FILM, AUDIO. ART, POETRY, ETC.:

[Some
of these videos are embeded on the BAUAW website:

http://bauaw.blogspot.com/
or bauaw.org ...bw]

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Checkpoint - Jasiri X

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq6Y6LSjulU

Published on Jan 28, 2014

"Checkpoint" is based on the
oppression and discrimination Jasiri X witnessed firsthand during his
recent trip to Palestine and Israel "Checkpoint" is produced by Agent of
Change, and directed by Haute Muslim. Download "Checkpoint" at https://jasirix.bandcamp.com/track/ch....

LYRICS
Journal of the hard times tales from the dark side
Evidence of the settlements on my hard drive
Man I swear my heart died at the end of that car ride
When I saw that checkpoint welcome to apartheid
Soldiers wear military green at the checkpoint
Automatic guns that's machine at the checkpoint
Tavors not m16s at the checkpoint
Fingers on the trigger you'll get leaned at the checkpoint
Little children grown adults or teens at the checkpoint
All ya papers better be clean at the checkpoint
You gotta but your finger on the screen at the checkpoint
And pray that red light turns green at the check point

If Martin Luther King had a dream of the checkpoint
He wake with loud screams from the scenes at the checkpoint
It's Malcolm X by any means at the check point
Imagine if you daily routine was the checkpoint

Separation walls that's surrounding the checkpoint
On top is barbwire like a crown on the checkpoint
Better have ya permits if your found at the checkpoint
Gunmen on the tower aiming down at the checkpoint
The idea is to keep you in fear of the checkpoint
You enter through the cage in the rear of the checkpoint
It feels like prison on a tier at the check point
I'd rather be anywhere but here at this checkpoint
Nelson Mandela wasn't blind to the check point
He stood for free Palestine not a check point
Support BDS don't give a dime to the checkpoint
This is international crime at the checkpoint
Arabs get treated like dogs at the checkpoint
Cause discrimination is the law at the checkpoint
Criminalized without a cause at the checkpoint
I'm just telling you what I saw at the checkpoint
Soldiers got bad attitudes at the checkpoint
Condescending and real rude at the checkpoint
Don't look em in they eyes when they move at the checkpoint
They might strip a man or woman nude at the checkpoint
Soldiers might blow you out of ya shoes at the checkpoint
Gas you up and then light the fuse at the checkpoint
Everyday you stand to be accused at the checkpoint
Each time your life you could lose at the checkpoint

If Martin Luther King had a dream of the checkpoint
He wake with loud screams from the scenes at the checkpoint
It's Malcolm X by any means at the check point
Imagine if you daily routine was the checkpoint

At the airport in Tel Aviv is a checkpoint
They pulled over our taxi at the checkpoint
Passport visa ID at the checkpoint
Soldiers going all through my things at the checkpoint
Said I was high risk security at the checkpoint
Because of the oppression I see at the checkpoint
Occupation in the 3rd degree at the checkpoint
All a nigga wanna do is leave fuck a checkpoint

On
Gun Control, Martin Luther King, the Deacons of Defense and the history of
Black Liberation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzYKisvBN1o&feature=player_embedded

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Fukushima
Never Again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU-Z4VLDGxU

"Fukushima,
Never Again" tells the story of the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdowns in
north east Japan in March of 2011 and exposes the cover-up by Tepco and the
Japanese government.

This
is the first film that interviews the Mothers Of Fukushima, nuclear power
experts and trade unionists who are fighting for justice and the protection of
the children and the people of Japan and the world. The residents and citizens
were forced to buy their own geiger counters and radiation dosimeters in order
to test their communities to find out if they were in danger.

The
government said contaminated soil in children's school grounds was safe and
then

when
the people found out it was contaminated and removed the top soil, the
government and TEPCO refused to remove it from the school grounds.

It
also relays how the nuclear energy program for "peaceful atoms" was brought
to Japan under the auspices of the US military occupation and also the criminal
cover-up of the safety dangers of the plant by TEPCO and GE management which
built the plant in Fukushima. It also interviews Kei Sugaoka, the GE nulcear
plant inspector from the bay area who exposed cover-ups in the safety at the
Fukushima plant and was retaliated against by GE. This documentary allows the
voices of the people and workers to speak out about the reality of the disaster
and what this means not only for the people of Japan but the people of the
world as the US government and nuclear industry continue to push for more new
plants and government subsidies. This film breaks

the
information blockade story line of the corporate media in Japan, the US and
around the world that Fukushima is over.

Production
Of Labor Video Project

P.O.
Box 720027

San
Francisco, CA 94172

www.laborvideo.org

lvpsf@laborvideo.org

For
information on obtaining the video go to:

www.fukushimaneveragain.com

(415)282-1908

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1000
year of war through the world

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiG8neU4_bs&feature=share

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Anatomy
of a Massacre - Afganistan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6BnRc11aug&feature=player_embedded

Afghans
accuse multiple soldiers of pre-meditated murder

To
see more go to http://www.youtube.com/user/journeymanpictures

Follow
us on Facebook (http://goo.gl/YRw42) or Twitter

(http://www.twitter.com/journeymanvod)

The
recent massacre of 17 civilians by a rogue US soldier has been shrouded in

mystery.
But through unprecedented access to those involved, this report

confronts
the accusations that Bales didn't act alone.

"They
came into my room and they killed my family". Stories like this are common

amongst
the survivors in Aklozai and Najiban. As are the shocking accusations

that
Sergeant Bales was not acting alone. Even President Karzai has announced

"one
man can not do that". Chief investigator, General Karimi, is suspicious

that
despite being fully armed, Bales freely left his base without raising

alarm.
"How come he leaves at night and nobody is aware? Every time we have

weapon
accountability and personal accountability." These are just a few of the

questions
the American army and government are yet to answer. One thing however

is
very clear, the massacre has unleashed a wave of grief and outrage which

means
relations in Kandahar will be tense for years to come: "If I could lay my

hands
on those infidels, I would rip them apart with my bare hands."

A
Film By SBS

Distributed
By Journeyman Pictures

April
2012

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Photo
of George Zimmerman, in 2005 photo, left, and in a more recent photo.